LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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