LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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