he said, and gave Calli a wink. “How do you know? Might be an improvement!”
“Fuck you, squid,” she replied.
“Any time you want, jarhead.”
I took a sip of the stuff and winced. “Good galloping gods, that’s awful!”
“Doc can’t hold his ’shine,” Sergeant Tomacek said, and the others laughed. A half dozen Marines were hanging out in the squad bay, and it looked like Doob had shared his talent for applied nanufactory chemistry with all of them. Highly contra-regs, of course. The Clymer, like all U.S. starships, is strictly dry. I suspected that Captain Reichert knew but chose not to know officially, so long as we kept the party to a dull roar and no one showed up drunk on duty.
The viewall was set to show an optical feed from outside, a deck-to-overhead window looking out over Mars, 9,300 kilometers below. The planet showed a vast red-orange disk with darker mottling; I could see the pimples of the Tharsis bulge volcanoes easily, with the east-to-west slash of the Valles Marineris just to the east. Phobos hung in the lower-right foreground, a lumpy and dark-gray potato, vaguely spherical but pocked and pitted with celestial acne. The big crater on one end—Stickney—and the Mars Orbital Research Station, rising from the crater floor, were hidden behind the moonlet’s mass, on the side facing the planet. The image, I decided, was being relayed from the non-rotating portion of the George Clymer. The Clymer’s habitation module was a fifty-meter rotating ring amidships, spinning six and a half times per minute to provide a modest four tenths of a gravity, the same as we’d experienced down on Mars.
“So what’s the celebration?” I asked Dubois. He always had a reason for breaking out the lab-nanufactured drinkables.
“The end of FMF training, of course! What’d you think?”
I took another cautious sip. It actually wasn’t too bad. Maybe that first swig had killed off the nerve endings.
“You’re one-eighty off course, Doob,” I told him. “We still have Europa, remember?”
FMF—the Fleet Marine Force—was arguably the most coveted billet in the entire U.S. Navy Hospital Corps. To win that silver insignia for your collar, you needed to go through three months of Marine training at Lejeune or Pendleton, then serve with the Marines for one year, pass their physical, demonstrate a daunting list of Marine combat and navigation skills, and pass a battery of tests, both written and in front of a senior enlisted board.
I’d been in FMF training since I’d made Third Class a year ago; our assignment on board the Clymer was the final phase of our training, culminating in the Ocher Sands fun and games that had us performing a live insertion and taking part in a Marine planetary assault. After this, we were supposed to deploy to Europa for three weeks of practical xenosophontology, swimming with the Medusae. After that, those of us still with the program would take our boards, and if we were lucky, only then would we get to append the letters FMF after our name and rank.
“Not the way I heard it, e-Car,” he said. He took a swig of his product straight from the flask. “Scuttlebutt has it we’re deploying I-S.”
I ignored use of the disliked handle. My name, Elliot Carlyle, had somehow been twisted into “e-Car.” Apparently there was a law of the Corps that said everyone had to have a nickname. Doob. Lewis was “Louie.” I’d spent the past year trying to get myself accepted as “Hawkeye,” a nod both to James Fenimore Cooper and to a twentieth-century entertainment series about military medical personnel in the field from which I’d downloaded a few low-res 2-D episodes years ago.
“Interstellar?” I said. “You’re full of shit. This stuff’s rotting your gray cells.”
“Don’t be so sure about your diagnosis, Doc,” Lewis told me. “I heard the same thing from a buddy in Personnel.”
“You’re both full of it,” I said. “Why would they send us?”
“Our dashing good looks and high intelligence?”
“In your case, Doob, it probably has to do with a punishment detail. You on the Old Man’s shit list?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So what’s supposed to be going down?”
Dubois grew serious, which was damned unusual for him. “The Qesh,” he said.
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Encyclopedia Galactica/Xenospecies Profile
Entry: Sentient Galactic Species 23931
“Qesh”
Qesh, Qesh’a, Imperial Qesh, Los Imperiales, “Jackers,” “Imps”
Civilization Type: 1.165 G
TL 20: FTL, Genetic Prostheses, Quantum Taps, Relativistic Kinetic Conversion
Societal Code: JKRS
Dominant: clan/hunter/warrior/survival
Cultural library: 5.45 x 1016 bits
Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 2.91 x 1011s
Biological Code: 786.985.965
Genome: 4.2 x 109 bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.019.
Biology: C, N, O, S, S8, Ca, Cu, Se, H2O, PO4
TNA
Diferrous hemerythrin proteins in C17H29COOH circulatory fluid.
Mobile heterotrophs, carnivores, O2 respiration.
Septopedal, quad- or sextopedal locomotion.
Mildly gregarious, polygeneric [2 genera, 5 species]; trisexual.
Communication: modulated sound at 5 to 2000 Hz and changing color patterns.
Neural connection equivalence NCE = 1.2 x 1014
T = ~300o to 470o K; M = 4.3 x 105 g; L: ~5.5 x 109s
Vision: ~5 micrometers to 520 nanometers, Hearing: 2 to 6000 Hz
Member: Galactic Polylogue
Receipt galactic nested code: 1.61 x 1012 s ago
Member: R’agch’lgh Collective
Locally initiated contact 1.58 x 1012 s ago
Star F1V; Planet: Sixth
a = 2.4 x 1011m; M = 2.9 x 1019g; R = 2.1 x 107m; p = 2.7 x 106s
Pd
