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 chemistries and most plastics, but inert if they slammed into a metal bulkhead.
Which kind were these? I wanted to believe that the tangos hadn’t 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
