Bloodstar. Ian Douglas

      “So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”

      “I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”

      “What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”

      “S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.

      “Don’t you?” McKean asked.

      “Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.

      “So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”

      Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.

      I shrugged. “I wanted to get rich, of course.”

      NO ONE JOINS THE NAVY TO GET RICH, OF COURSE. YOU GET ROOM and board and some great opportunities to travel, sure, but base pay is about a twelfth what a good systems programmer gets on the outside, and maybe a quarter of the take-home pay of a ’bot director at an e-car manufactory. No one, unless you take the long view, and have a father who’s senior vice president of research and development for General Nanodynamics.

      Lots of medical doctors get their start in the Hospital Corps. It offers a good, basic education in general medicine and applied nano, and universities with medical programs smile on ex-corpsmen looking for grants or scholarships. But the economic rewards can be even bigger when what you bring home is a cool and useful bit of xenotech.

      That’s because, anymore, Navy Corpsmen aren’t just the enlisted medics for the Marines and Navy. Because of their technical training, and the fact that in the field and they’re already lugging around a fair amount of specialized gear, they’re also the science technicians for any military field op. Sampling the local atmosphere, studying the biosphere and reporting on what might bite, and even establishing first contact with the locals all fall into a Corpsman’s MOS, his military occupational specialty—his job description, if you like.

      And that means that Corpsmen are perfectly placed to pick up alien technologies when they make first contact, or to bring home innovative ways of utilizing human nanotech. They even get to keep the military-issued CDF hardware that allows in-head linking, and that can provide a hell of a competitive advantage in the civilian world.

      So when I finished the series on my basic education downloads, my father, Spencer Carlyle, suggested that I might want to join the Navy—specifically the Hospital Corps—in order to learn skills that would benefit both me and the family.

      My grandfather went to work for General Nanodynamics sixty-three years ago when it was a data-mining start-up, wading through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s hundreds of millions of hours of data, finding the codes that would unlock its secrets and release untold alien secrets of science, technology, and art that we could apply here on Earth. Better, though, is to go straight to the source, to actually learn new methods of materials manufacturing or chemistry or medicine directly from a living xenoculture. It’s one thing to pull off the EG’s stats on the X’ghr and learn that they’re very good at biochemistry. It’s something quite else to visit the aliens in person and pick their brains.

      In 2212, my father led the General Nanodynamics team that developed cybertelomeric engineering from the data brought back from direct contact with the X’ghr eight years earlier.

      Telomeres are the end-caps that keep chromosomes from unraveling, but they grow shorter with each division of the cell. When the telomeres wear away after forty or fifty divisions, the cell dies and aging sets in. Cybertelomerics refers to various means of controlling or guiding telomere replication inside cells without generating the out-of-control cell growth and immortality known as a cancer. As a result, humans alive today can expect to live two or three hundred years or more, rejuve treatments can have an eighty-year-old looking like forty, and clinical immortality might be just around the corner. Whether or not human immortality is a good thing is beside the point; the biochemical data brought back from the X’ghr homeworld by the crew of the Hippocrates promises to utterly transform what it means to be human.

      That one bit of xenotech should have made my family quite wealthy.

      It didn’t. That was because the government stepped in and declared telomere therapy a national asset, with patents owned and controlled by the Commonwealth Institute of Health. Dad got a pat on the back and a nice bonus, but do you have any idea how much rich old people would pay for treatments that would keep them going for another couple of centuries? Or keep them looking and performing like VR sex stars?

      But the government wants to maintain control of who gets rejuve treatments, at least for now. They say it’s to prevent runaway overpopulation; Dad was convinced that we’re going to have a lot of very young-looking senators, presidents, and wealthy campaign contributors over the next few centuries.

      Cynical? Sure. And he managed to infect me with his bitterness as well. Government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: it’s a system that’s been around for an obscenely long time, and one that’s very hard to fight. So Dad set out not to fight the system so much as to work with it. If we could nail down another big advance in medicine, materials processing, or chemistry from an untapped xenotech source, we might be able to exploit it off-world—at one of the free-market colonies, maybe—and do it in such a way that the Commonwealth couldn’t touch it.

      That was the plan, at any rate. Nanotechnics is highly competitive, and new developments and techniques are coming along every day. The field is dominated by three or four big megacorporations and a dozen smaller ones, and the company that doesn’t keep up is going to find itself sidelined and forgotten in very short order. General Nanodynamics is about nine or ten in the hierarchy, but it’s well-placed to go multi-world and even give IBN and Raytheon-Mitsubishi a run for their e-creds.

      My dad got into the field the old-fashioned way, going the route of AI development, but he thought having a Corpsman in the family might increase the chances of landing something big … a new technology, a new means of controlling or programming nanobots, a new approach to an old problem, like what the X’ghr did for telomere research.

      And I was pretty excited about the idea myself. It wasn’t like I was letting my Dad do my thinking for me. I’d wanted to join the Navy anyway, the Hospital Corps in particular, because I had my eye on going to a school like Johns Hopkins or Bethesda University, one with a good medical download program, with an eye to becoming a doctor. I’d never been much interested in following in my father’s footsteps … or the footsteps of my grandfather and great grandfather. A century of Carlyles in General Nanodynamics, I thought, was quite enough.

      Besides, to make money, real money, we needed to break free of the pack. As an employee of General Nanodynamics, with all of his ideas becoming the intellectual property of the corporation, my dad could manage a living that was comfortable enough, sure, but there is well-off rich, and there is filthy rich with a private Earth-to-orbit shuttle, your own synchorbital private mansion, and maybe a shot at some telomeric genengineering.

      If I found myself in a position to bring back some exploitable xenotech, something Dad and his contacts could turn into a few hundred billion creds and a high-living lifestyle … hey, why not? I was in.

      But I needed to go Fleet Marine Force to make it Out There, to give myself even a chance of being on a first contact team or encountering a new technic species not described in the EG.

      And after my encounter with Private Howell that morning, I thought that my chances of that were becoming somewhat bleak. If I got dropped from FMF, I was looking at six more years of routine duty—working on the wards of a naval hospital somewhere, or serving as staff at a research station in Outer God-knows-where.