Terran rhinoceros, but with a longer body and six legs. The upper body, like the forequarters of the mythical centaur, weaved back and forth, displaying a single centrally positioned arm. The grippers at the end were holding a weapon of some sort.
What sort we couldn’t tell. An instant after seeing it, the scene dissolved into white static.
“The earlier reports,” Captain Carter said, “have been confirmed with this transmission.”
The static gave way to a VR simulation of the colony, fully interactive, the city domes and towers gleaming undamaged beneath the red sun.
“The armored figure you just saw was a Qesh warrior,” Carter went on, “and the ships appear identical to the vessels designated as ‘Rocs’ encountered during our first contact with that species fifty-nine years ago. Clearly, the Qesh have entered the Gliese 581 system and landed a raiding party, at the very least … and possibly they have arrived with a full invasion force.
“Commonwealth Military Command is taking this very seriously. Our first contact with Qesh raiders took place at a star system ninety-four light years from Earth. Gliese 581, however, is just twenty light years from Sol, a near neighbor as interstellar distances go. Only eighty-eight other stars are closer. CMC is concerned that the human colony on Bloodworld, a network of cities and bases established pre-Protocol, might have navigational data that could lead the Qesh to Earth.
“Marine Deep Recon Force 7 is being deployed to Bloodworld for covert insertion and detailed surveillance in advance of a joint Navy-Marine operation to stabilize the situation.”
An invasion, then. Stabilize, in mil-speak, would in this instance mean throwing the Qesh off of Bloodworld, or at the very least making certain they didn’t pick up any clues to Earth’s location.
“Questions?” Carter demanded. “Yes. Abrams.”
From my vantage point, it looked like just me and Lieutenant Carter were standing on that rugged, basaltic plain, but his audience included all twelve hundred Marines and naval personnel on board the Clymer.
“Sir,” the voice of Staff Sergeant Abrams said. “Are the locals white hats? Or black?”
“At this point, Staff Sergeant,” Carter replied, “we have no idea. In fact, that’s probably the main reason MRF-7 is going in first. Any planetary invasion force will have to know if we can count on the local population for logistical support and intelligence.”
It seemed like kind of a dumb question at first. Bloodworld was a human colony; that colony had been attacked by Imperial aliens, so of course they were on our side, “white hats,” in Marine parlance. Right?
But as I thought about it, well, no question is truly dumb, and this one was smarter than most. Those colonists were members of a small and closely knit religious sect, and that fact alone threw the usual rules right out the airlock.
History is filled with examples of small religious groups that went against the mainstream, and which were willing to die for the privilege. Hell, Christianity started off as a Jewish splinter group with some strange ideas about the expected Messiah. The Essene community—after which the Neoessenes had patterned themselves—we think was another Jewish schismatic group that had moved out to the desert to live in communes rather than follow the dictates of the Jewish Temple priesthood.
And more recently you have the messianic cults of Jim Jones and David Koresh, the jihadists of the more extremist versions of Islam, and the Aum Shinrikyo, the crazies in Japan who tried to usher in global Armageddon with a home-brewed nerve gas attack on five Tokyo subway trains. A century and a half later you have the neo-Luddie White Seraphim incident on Chiron. Human beings appear to be hardwired for an us-against-them religious mentality, which can be expressed as a fanaticism as destructive as any political movement.
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
