LITMIR.BIZ

      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,

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