I suddenly realized that the Commonwealth government must be having convulsions right now about whether those colonists could be trusted. Religious fanaticism by definition is irrational. If some of them thought God had told them to hand Earth’s galactic coordinates over to the Qesh, what would they do?
Marine Recon 7 would be going in at least partly to determine whose side the locals were on. A secondary aspect to the op would be to try to convince them that their best bet lay in helping us if they seemed undecided.
A hearts-and-minds mission, then. Just freaking great.
“Training sims will begin tomorrow at 0900,” Carter said.
The landscape receded suddenly, the surface of the planet dropping away to merge with a planetary graphic, a computer-generated map of Bloodworld showing terrain features crossed by lines of longitude and latitude. I was looking down on the planet’s nightside, at a vast splash of glaciers radiating from the midnight area, amid ocean, bare rock, and ice-sheathed mountains.
“At this point in the planning process,” Carter continued, as a green, curving line arced down across the glacier, approaching the planet’s surface close to the horizon, “we are assuming a landing by D-Mist on the planet’s nightside, with a combat skimmer approach to the twilight band.”
The planet graphic rotated to show the narrow band circling the world from pole to pole, the narrow strip of approximately temperate surface between the heat of the daytime desert and the frozen ice of the night. Several cities were located there, balanced between light and the darkness.
“Enemy numbers and compositions are as yet unknown,” Carter added. “The training sims will cover a variety of possible mission encounters and circumstances. Expect the sessions to continue until we’re on our final approach. Other questions? Good. Carry on.”
So that was it, then. My first combat insertion, and none of us had a clue as to what we would be up against. The Qesh would be bad enough; not knowing the human reaction to our arrival made the whole situation just a bit unnerving.
The Misty was a smaller cousin of the Cutlass TAV, a trans-atmospheric lander designed to carry combat-ready troops from orbit to ground quickly and, so far as it was possible, invisibly. The name came from the craft’s designation, D/MST-22, which stood for deployment/maneuver skimmer transport. Judging from what little we actually knew about the locals’ technology, we should be able to slip through their detector net easily enough.
It was the Qesh we’d have to worry about during the approach.
The briefing feed released its hold on my brain, and I blinked, stretched, and sat up. Marines around me were sitting up as well. Sergeant Tomacek looked around and growled, “Where the fuck’s Doc Doobie and his hooch?”
“Fuckin’ A,” Corporal Gregory agreed. “If the aye-ayes’re gonna curdle my brain for the next twelve days, I want some anesthetic, know what I mean?”
“How about it, Doc?” a private named Kilgore asked, looking at me. “Where’s your buddy?”
I checked my in-head tracker. Doob and the other Corpsmen on board the Clymer were all listed there, and a mental glance showed me the current location of each. Shit. The blip representing Dubois was inside his rack-tube in 3/19, snuggled up very close alongside the blip representing HM3 Carla Harper, the cute little pearl diver from Clymer’s lab.
Looked like he’d scored after all, and with a FAB, this time, honest-to-God flesh-and-blood, instead of a ViRsim lover.
“He’s … busy,” I told the Marines. “But I’m sure he’ll be glad to break out the good stuff a little later.”
Seeing those two green blips together bordered on TMI—too much information. I wasn’t jealous … exactly. Carla was a cute little armful who definitely knew her Bac-T and cell chemistries, fun to talk to, easy on the optical nerves, and I imagine she’d be a bunch of fun to cuddle with in the rack. But I’d never tried to find out for myself, I suppose because I was still getting over Paula.
Damn, damn, damn. Here I was accelerating out beyond the orbit of Mars, headed for the interstellar abyss and a deployment twenty light years from home, and I was still dragging that around.
GOD, HAD IT REALLY BEEN A WHOLE YEAR AGO THAT I LOST HER?
I’d joined the Navy early in 2241. Three months of Navy basic in San Diego, followed by six months of near-constant downloading at Corps School in San Antonio. I’d met Paula one afternoon shortly after starting Corps School. She was an AI programmer, a civilian G-7 working on-base with a love of history and an enchanting sense of fun. I was on liberty in downtown San Antonio—at the Alamo, in fact, the site of a famous last stand four centuries ago—when I bumped into her, literally, in the snack shop, and started discussing Davy Crockett and last stands and the park’s ViR download recreations of the battle. We’d ended up in bed at a little park’n’fuck outside of SAMMC’s main gate for what I’d thought at the time was just going to be a one-night stand.
Three years later—three fantastic years that had me thinking I was head-over-heels in love—she was dead.
I’d long since graduated from Corps School by then, but I was still stationed at SAMMC—the San Antonio Military Medical Center, located at Fort Sam Houston on the northeast edge of the city. I’d gone straight from Hospital Corps “A” school to hospital duty at the Navy Orbital Medical Facility in low Earth orbit for microgravity training, then back to SAMMC for Advanced Medical Technology School. Both NOM duty and AMT were “C” schools, and absolutely necessary if I was going to go FMF, and my download schedule was insane.
Busy? My God, I was taking so many training downloads and ViRsim feeds I didn’t know who I was half the time. I was getting, I thought, just a taste of what physicians experience when they’re running a half dozen live-in expert AIs. But Paula Barton was still with me despite the hours and the week-long stretch while I was in orbit. We were even talking about getting married, though marriage was considered to be a bit on the old-fashioned side, something for love-struck fluffies with big red hearts in their eyes.
I don’t know about the hearts, but I was certainly love struck. My caudate nuclei were so saturated with dopamine my brain sloshed when I walked, and I had all the signs and symptoms that dreaded mental illness commonly called Being In Love.
So in the spring of ’44 I was working at the SAMMC base dispensary, still assimilating those gigabytes of AMT data and waiting for my orders for Camp Lejeune. I had a weekend free and we decided to run up to Glacier’s Edge on the Maine coast.
We caught the sub-O out of San Antonio for the twenty-minute flight to Boston. I had an electric eccount, of course, so I checked out the free e-car at the oport for the last leg of the trip up to Acadia. We oohed and ahhed at the 100-meter ice cliffs, of course, and did all the usual touristy things. Sunday morning, we drove out to the dometown of New Bar Harbor and rented a sailboat for a close-in run along the glacier coming down off Schooner Head and Mount Champlain.
She was a four-meter day sailor, sloop-rigged, and with a level-two AI smart enough to take over the sail-handling if the human passengers didn’t know what they were doing. I’d had some sailing experience already, so the AI was on standby and we were catching a gentle, cold breeze off the ice, making our way south along the ice-cloaked Mount Desert coast.
And Paula dropped her sandwich.
She had a puzzled look on her face. “I can’t feel my right hand,” she said, and when she tried to pick her sandwich up off the deck, her fingers refused to cooperate.
It took me a moment, though, to catch on that something was really wrong … but when she slumped over on the seat next to me, a shock ran through me that I will never, ever forget.
Oh, God, no! No! No! …
I dropped the tiller and scooped