more spacesuited bodies, Marines, and a lot more drifting globules of blood, a tangle too confused for me to count. Marines were moving among the rescued hostages, cuffing their hands with zipstrips. Until we were absolutely sure of who was a tango and who was a hostage, we handled them all as potential terrorists. There was a bank of link-in controls along one bulkhead. I saw one deeply padded seat with a dead tango strapped into it, his hands still on the palmpads on the chair’s arms. He’d probably been the terrorist commander, running the station’s defenses by jacking in at this secondary control center, but the ugly crater in his spacesuit’s chest showed that a Marine had taken him out with a laser rifle.
“Corpsman, front!”
I homed on this new call, pushing my way through the milling civilians and Marines. Gunny Hancock was waving to me from an open hatch in the bulkhead beyond. “In here, Doc! On the double!”
Drifting through the opening, I entered a small and bare compartment—probably a storage locker. There were two M’nangat drifting inside, and one of them looked like it was hurt. Another dead tango floated near the overhead, a MAW pistol still clutched his hand.
I drifted over to the alien. “What happened?” I asked.
“That guy shot him,” Hancock said, “just as we came through the door. Is it bad?”
“It’s not good.”
The M’nangat are surprisingly like us biologically—carbon-based oxygen breathers, with metal-chelated tetrapyroles pumped through an enclosed circulatory system by a pair of two-chambered hearts working in synch. They even use DNA for genetic coding rather than one of several other xenobiological possibilities, but that’s where the similarities stop. The being was a couple of meters long, resembling a pale, blue-green pillar of thick, tightly twisted tentacles like a tree’s trunk, which then spread out from the creature’s base like the roots of a tree. At the top end was what looked like a half-meter cluster of grapes—though each grape was the size of an orange—translucent, and shot through with flecks of red and gold. The wounded one had a savage puncture in one side of its leathery trunk, and blue-green liquid was jetting in spurts from the wound with enough force to paint one bulkhead and drive the being into the other like a small rocket. Slits beneath the grape cluster representing mouths and breathing apertures gaped and pulsed, and the being uttered a startlingly human-sounding groan.
“You’ll be okay, fella,” I said. The reassurance was automatic; I didn’t expect the creature to answer. But a link switched on within my in-head, and the words “Thank you” wrote themselves out on an inner window.
I’d not realized that the M’nangat shared something else with us besides our body chemistries, that they had CNS prostheses that, among other things, could connect with an AI residing within their internal hardware and communicate with other software in the area … such as a translator program.
And as soon as I thought about that, something clicked into place … something I’d just seen and not thought about, but which represented a terrible danger to the station and to us.
“Gunny!” I yelled, turning. “That dead tango in the seat out there …”
“What about him, Doc?”
“If he has an AI—”
I saw Hancock’s eyes widen behind his helmet visor. It had clicked for him too. He turned to duck out of the small compartment, but in that same instant I felt a solid jolt, and the sensation of weight tugged at me with a terrifying insistence. It wasn’t much—maybe a tenth of a gravity, but it was terrifying in its implications.
The massive meta-fueled thrusters mounted to the surface of Atun 3840 had just fired. The one-kilometer asteroid and its attached mining station were decelerating … which meant we were now beginning to fall out of orbit and toward the Earth’s surface.
And if we hit we were going to leave one hell of a big crater.
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
