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 it, opening the path ahead, sliding it through glistening wet tissue. I had it clear of the heart and brain, finally, but if the round detonated it would still kill my patient.
Easy … easy …
Dimly, I was aware of Corporal Lewis coming up behind me and saying something to the other M’nangat, something about needing her help with a report. Good. I don’t like an audience when I work, even if the audience can’t see what the hell I’m doing.
Three more centimeters. Through my N-prog, I’d programmed the ’bots to work together as a single organism, contracting, and then expanding as it moved, clawing against the local magnetic field. I was approaching now the part of the wound that I’d already covered with skinseal. I didn’t want to disturb the congealing powder, and would have to route my microscopic parade around that region. That way, I decided, just beneath the M’nangat’s tough, outer layer of skin.
I would have to slice through the skin to remove the bullet, just there, two centimeters to one side of the skinsealed wound.
“I’m going to have to make a small cut in your skin,” I said, allowing my AI to translate for me. I touched her side. “Right about here. But I don’t have anything to keep it from hurting.”
IT . . . HURTS … NOW, was the reply.
I hated working without anesthetic, but the way a species transmits signals through its central nervous system—pain, temperature, pressure, or the more esoteric impulses for emotions or thoughts—is as unique as the way it deals with immune responses. I can block pain in a human patient easily enough because we understand how human pain works through the doloric receptors inside the thalamus and the insular cortex of the brain, but we have no idea how the analogous system works in the M’nangat. We just don’t understand their biochemistry well enough yet.
“Okay,” I said, slipping a laser scalpel from my M-7 pack and snapping it on. “Brace yourself.”
I made a single quick, short incision, trying to slice through just the tough and gnarled outer integument without touching the nano-clad bullet just underneath. The M’nangat tensed, and its tentacles whiplashed for an instant, threatening to put us both into a microgravity tumble.
“Steady,” I told herm. “Hold on now …”
Several tentacles flicked up and wrapped themselves around my legs, gripping me tightly. That hadn’t been what I’d meant by “hold on,” but it seemed to serve as the Broc equivalent of biting the bullet. Green blood emerged from the cut in a dense, expanding cloud … and the nano-D round came with it.
I let the bullet float free as I released the scalpel and snatched another bag of skinseal, thumbing it open. Right about then, I felt another shudder and weight returned … again, about a tenth of a gravity.
The meta thrusters were
