LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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