Читать книгу Bloodstar - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 11

I’D BEEN LIVING WITH PAULA’S MEANINGLESS DEATH FOR THE NEXT year, which I suppose was better than the alternative, which was not living with her death. There was a time, there, after I got back to SAMMC, when I was thinking seriously of checking myself out. It’s simple enough to disable the safeguards in an N-prog, and custom-tailor a few billion nanobots to take you down into coma-level sleep before quietly shutting down all your CNS and cardiac functions. No pain, no awareness, nothing. You just go to sleep and never wake up. After about five minutes with no blood flow, your brain starts dying, degrading to the point where you can’t even capture the cerebral pattern any longer.

God, I wanted to die.

The problem was that I was afraid I would wake up.

I’d never been very religious. My parents were Reformed Gardnerians, which meant they believed in reincarnation, among other things. I’d never thought that much about it one way or another. So far as I was concerned, I’d live the usual three or four hundred years, then die, and then I’d find out what happened next, assuming that new medical advances hadn’t extended the expected human life span even further. No problem either way.

But I did start thinking about it after I lost Paula, thinking about it a lot, usually when I was alone in my rack-tube back at SAMMC, lying there in the claustrophobic dark thinking through, step by step, how I could reprogram my N-prog to let me kill myself. What if my folks were right? I’d slip off into a coma, the ’bots would shut me down … only that wouldn’t be the end. I’d wake up on the Other Side, realizing that whatever lessons I’d been supposed to face in this life were still there waiting for me. Shit, I might have to go through the whole thing all over again. You know what they say about reincarnation. It’s the belief that you keep coming back again and again and again until you get it right.

Worse than that, though: What if the pain didn’t go away?

The fact that Paula might be waiting for me on the Other Side did occur to me, of course, and for a while, there, it made the nanobot option damned attractive, let me tell you. I got as far as actually working out the program algorithms for my N-prog and assembling the hardware I would need.

But I didn’t do it. I couldn’t. I was afraid of the pain that went on and on, but I was afraid of the idea of dying, too. I didn’t want to live without her, but I didn’t want to die, either.

It didn’t help that I knew exactly where those feelings of loss and emptiness were coming from physically. We’ve known for several centuries now about the role played by the caudate nuclei—there are two of them, in either half of the brain—in the messy addiction we commonly refer to as being in love. Dopamine—that same neurotransmitter that Howell used to o-loop himself into convulsions—is emitted by the VTA and other areas of the brain and floods the caudal regions, which are tied in with the VTA circuit. Under the dopamine’s influence, we’re filled with an intense energy, exhilaration, focused attention, and the motivation to win awards in the form of attention and approval from our love interest. We’re able to stay up all night, to be bolder than usual, even to run insane risks when we’re showing off … all for the sake of love. Being in love, it turns out, actually is closely related to being addicted to drugs—and the withdrawal when the love interest drops you or dies can be as painful and drawn out as going cold turkey on a physical addiction.

The first week, I was numb. They gave me ten days’ compassionate leave. The funeral was there in San Antonio; after that, I went home to Ohio. I don’t remember a whole lot about that time, to tell the truth.

By the time I got back, my orders for North Carolina were in. Still feeling numb, but no longer thinking of ways to turn off the pain, I hopped the sub-O for Wilmington, and a billet with FMF Training Command.

And after that, I was way too busy to think that much about what had happened in Maine.

But one thing stayed with me, and continued to gnaw at me throughout the course. I’d come up short when Paula got hit with the stroke. Yeah, there’d been technical difficulties with a poorly programmed AI on the boat, and, yeah, there’s not a lot I could have done, even if we’d been shoreside in a hospital. But Gods, that feeling of abject helplessness …

It had me wondering if I was cut out at all for FMF.

SIX DAYS AFTER LEAVING STARPORT, WE WERE TEN ASTRONOMICAL units out from the sun, beyond the orbit of Saturn and traveling at better than 5,000 kilometers per second. The VR sim downloads were relentless and demanding, one possible scenario following the next as the training AIs hammered us with tactics while at the same time probing for weakness.

I think I did okay on the general stuff, treating Marines for a variety of wounds or other injuries while going on simulated patrols across simulated landscapes and encountering simulated ambushes. We must have approached the city of Salvation in fifty different situations—with the inhabitants welcoming us, with the inhabitants opening fire as we drew near, with the Qesh already in possession of the city and the sky patrolled by armored Qesh fliers. In fact, most of the ViRsims had the Qesh already in the city and waiting for us. By the time we made the transition to Alcubierre warp, after all, they’d already been on the planet for a couple of weeks.

One and a half billion kilometers from Sol, the local metric of space was flat enough that the Clymer could gather her figurative skirts up around her and slip into her own private universe. Nothing in the universe, neither material nor energy, can travel faster than light, but there’s nothing in the universal rules and regs that prevents space from doing so. In fact, we know that the fabric of space expanded far faster than c during the fraction of a second of universal inflation immediately after the big bang. The Alcubierre Drive, named for the Mexican physicist who first outlined the concept late in the twentieth century, enveloped the starship in tightly folded space. The ship is not moving at all relative to the space within which it’s resting; the bubble around it, however, slides through normal space at high multiples of the speed of light, and just happens to carry the motionless starship with it.

The idea is so weirdly counter-intuitive it makes my brain hurt. Fortunately, I just had to worry about field medicine, first aid, and the occasional dopamine cascade, not advanced gravitational topology or torsion-field manipulation.

On the sixth day, we folded into our Alcubierre bubble; on the seventh, we arrived at Bloodstar, 20.3 light years away.

IT LOOKS,” PRIVATE HUTCHISON SAID, “LIKE A BIG RED EYE. STARING at us.”

We were in the squad bay, looking at the image projected on the viewall bulkhead. Gliese 581, the Bloodstar, hung there in the middle of emptiness, a black-mottled orb the exact hue of arterial blood. The corona was easily visible as a pale haze surrounding the disk, as were the jets and loops of prominences extending above the rim. The surface of the disk appeared grainy, like it was made up of low-res pixels, and the starspots covered perhaps 10 percent of its face. A particularly large starspot grouping close to the center gave the impression of the jet-black pupil of a titanic, bloody eye.

And it was watching us, or so it seemed.

“This is the magnified view from the bridge, Hutch,” Gunnery Sergeant Hancock told him. “We’re still a long way out—over three AUs. Our naked eyes would see it from here as just a bright red speck.”

Gliese 581 only possessed about three tenths of Sol’s mass, so the flat metric the astrogators were always looking for went all the way in almost to the three-AU mark—3.1 to be exact—or about 464 million kilometers. The small Navy-Marine task force had emerged back into normal space hours ago, the ships shedding their excess velocity with the dissipation of the spacial torsion field. They retained a velocity of some hundreds of kilometers per second, however, as they hurtled in toward the red dwarf star. Falling tail first, they switched on their Plottel space drives and decelerated, backing down the descending slope at a steady 1 G.

Gunny Hancock thoughtclicked a display icon, and the looming image of the red dwarf dwindled into a graphic of the Gliese 581 system, the planetary orbits marked by red circles with the star at the center. Bloodstar has six planets, all of them tucked in next to their primary so tightly that the fifth planet out has an orbit closer to its sun than Mercury’s is from Earth’s, and even Niffelheim, the frigid outermost planet, is as far from Gliese 581 as Venus is from Sol.

Even from three AUs out, it was clear that the Qesh were in the Gliese 581 system in force. I could see a swarm of white points around the fourth planet out, each tagged by alphanumerics giving the object’s mass, vector, and probable identification.

I looked at the faces of the Marines around me. Most of Bravo Company was there, I thought.

The compartment was crowded. Living space on board an interstellar transport like the Clymer is pretty cramped—witness the rank upon rank of rack-tubes in the berthing compartments—but the squad bays are a lot more spacious. Well, we still call them squad bays, for tradition’s sake, but each is actually an open recreational compartment big enough to accommodate physically an entire Marine rifle company, and that’s fifty or sixty men and women. The deck can grow that many chairs for flesh-and-blood briefings, when we need them, and the viewall can project the skipper’s face for inspiring speeches, or show the tactical situation, as now, as we dropped into the Bloodstar’s inner system.

Some of those faces showed fear, some curiosity, a few a kind of smirking disdain. Most, though, had that matter-of-fact aura of professionalism I’d come to associate with the Marine Corps during the past year.

But damn, there were a lot of Qesh super-ships gathered around Salvation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a full-strength predarian warfleet.

They appeared to be dismantling the planet’s moons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Recon rules the night!” several voices chorused.

“Ooh-rah!” chorused some others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The art of intimidation,” I suggested.

“It’s still freakin’ stupid!”

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

“What’s that, Gunny?”

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

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

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

“So,” Andrews said, “we’re outnumbered and outteched.”

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

“Yeah, Gunny? What’s that?”

“We’re Marines.”

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

Sometimes the sheer arrogance of the Marines amazes me.

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

Since Captain Samuel Nicholas recruited the first Continental Marines at Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern in 1775, the Corps has been America’s first and best line of defense. Are American interests at risk? Are American citizens threatened? Does the Army need a beachhead? Send in the Marines