Bloodstar. Ian Douglas

“Masha” suggested that she likely was from Russia, Ukraine, or the Yakutsk Republic. Her English was perfect, though, so for all I knew she could have been North American, maybe from a Russian immigrant family. It was hard to know these days, with basic language downloads as good as they were.

      So why didn’t I ask her? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that she hadn’t sent more of her own personal data was putting me off. It suggested that she was keeping this on a strictly waitress-customer basis, and I felt as though asking her where she was from would come across as a really lame attempt to chat her up. I was feeling awkward and embarrassed and somewhat torn. Part of me wanted to talk her into bed, but as we bantered more, a larger part of me became convinced that she was more interested in my e-cred balance than in me.

      And what was so wrong with that? The flesh-and-blood waitstaff in places like the Earthview aren’t paid all that well, even when you add in their tips, and the cost of workers’ quarters at Starport can eat up your e-cred balance real fast. What they do with their off hours is their business, so why not?

      I was tempted, I really was. Masha looked like fun, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a long-term relationship. After Paula? Hell, no. I was through with long-term hearts-and-flowers, long romantic interludes, and deeply intimate relationships.

      But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that what I wanted was something more than the clinical workings of a commercial transaction.

      We talked a few more moments, and then she left to get me another drink—a zero-G floater this time. The trajectory had blasted me pretty heavily; was that why I suddenly wasn’t interested in sex? Anyway, I was pretty sure another trajectory was going to set me hard on my ass. The floater was milder, would be easier on my system, with a lower percentage of C₂H₆O and less of a kick.

      I looked across at Doob and Machine. They both were totally off planet—approaching the inevitable climax of their links in perfect time with the ménage up on the furry stage.

      Masha returned with my drink a moment later, then wandered off to check on her other customers. I looked past the writhing ménage on stage at the image of Earth suspended against the stars. Maybe a part of my inability to join in had to do with how unsettled I was feeling just then. Until recently, I’d thought I’d known exactly what I was and where I was going. If I didn’t make FMF, though, all of that was called into question.

      Oh, the next seven years would be spent in the Navy, there was no question about that; I couldn’t shout “I changed my mind!” and take back my signature on my re-up agreement. But holding sick call for service personnel and their dependents at some naval base Earthside, or maybe getting to work at an outpost off planet somewhere, holding sick call, running lab tests, performing medscans.

      The alert went off inside my skull.

      It started as a long, piercing, two-pitch whistle, like the old-fashioned boatswain’s whistles of the old-time surface Navy.

      “Attention, Clymer personnel,” a voice said in my head after the whistle died away. “Attention Clymer personnel. Now recall, recall, recall. All hands report back aboard ship immediately. This is an embarkation order. Repeat …”

      I gulped down the remaining half of my floater, hesitated, then put an extra-big tip on the table account for Masha. Across the table, Doob and Machine were blinking their eyes, looking around in a somewhat dazed manner. Recall alerts came through whether your channels were switched off, like mine, or even if they were fully engaged in other activities. I was suddenly delighted that I’d decided not to take the music’s genie up on her offer to take things further.

      Talk about rude interruptions!

      Somehow, they managed to pay their tabs, and we made our way out of the Earthview.

      A lot of other men and women were doing the same thing.

      Chapter Five

      WE EMBARKED FROM STARPORT A FEW HOURS AFTER OUR RETURN to the Clymer.

      All three of us hit the sober-up in sick bay, a heavy dose of nanobots programmed to break down the ethanol and release oxygen into the blood. The effect is kind of like going from pleasant free-fall sensations to slamming face-first into the deck, but you’re thinking more clearly when the shock wears off, and there’s no hangover.

      Much of the conversation in the squad bay was centered on our precipitous recall. “Damn,” Doob said, shaking his head. “I was just about to make it with that genie, too!”

      “You do know it was all in your head, right?” I asked him.

      “What’s your point? You make it with FAB, that’s all in your head too.”

      I shrugged. He had a point. Sex was sex, whether you got it on with a virtual reality program downloaded into your brain’s sensory centers, or had an orgasm with flesh and blood. In fact, brain scans had pointed out three centuries ago that when it came to a cerebral download of a recorded event, to a remembered event, or to an actual event taking place in physical reality, the brain can’t tell the difference.

      The Clymer, with twelve hundred Marines of MRF-7 embarked on board, accelerated under Plottel Drive out-system at 1 full gravity, seeking the flat metric required by the astrogation department, where local space carried only a minimum curvature from gravity. Flat gravitometrics allowed us to switch on the Alcubierre Drive, which would let us cruise out-system faster than light, and in the case of Sol, could be found about ten astronomical units out, a little farther than the orbit of Saturn. We were accompanied by the Marine assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, the heavy cruiser Ticonderoga, and two destroyers, the Fife and the Decatur.

      They say that the one form of FTL even faster than Alcubierre Drive is shipboard scuttlebutt. We all were wondering what had happened up in officers’ country. They’d sent down the briefing on Bloodworld before we’d reached Earth, granted us liberty, and only then suddenly called us back. There’s a technical term for that—“situation normal, all fucked up,” popularly shortened to SNAFU. Global comments, cerebral implants, direct-data downloads, AI intelligences a thousand times more powerful than human brains, and still the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

      At 0930 hours the next morning after our departure, an announcement came through for all hands not on duty to rack out. That meant another full-immersion briefing, one with all of us lying down as the command constellation piped in the data. I wasn’t scheduled for the sick bay watch until 1600 hours, so I found a free recliner in the squad bay rather than going back to my berthing compartment and my tube, and strapped myself in. I closed my eyes, opened the main channel, and a moment later I was standing once again on Bloodworld.

      I say “once again” in a purely virtual sense, of course, since I’d never been there physically. In the previous briefing, the download had let me virtually stand on the tortured planet’s surface as the basic ephemeris data scrolled through my skull, and the downloaded simulation unfolded a 360-degree world around me, one that I could, within fairly free limits, explore. This time, though, I was a bit more restricted in what I could look at, and the briefing officer was there as well.

      “Good morning, Marines,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Carter. We have some updated intelligence on the Bloodstar situation.”

      Carter was our company S2, the unit intelligence officer and the guy in charge of operational security. He was short, freckled, and red haired, with a boyish look about him that didn’t inspire all that much confidence.

      But he generally seemed to know what he was talking about.

      “Yesterday,” he said, “we briefed you on our destination, Bloodworld. We had received an alert by way of a message drone from naval assets at Gliese 581 telling us that ships believed to be operated by the Qesh had entered the system.

      “Since that time, a second message drone has arrived from Salvation.