Bloodstar. Ian Douglas

stood on a plain of black, rugged basalt at the edge of a cliff above a seething ocean. The city of Salvation, the Neoessenist capital, seemed to grow from the rocks a kilometer in the distance, a collection of white domes and truncated pyramids emerging from a cliff face beyond the sprawl of a small spaceport. The red dwarf sun hung low in a deep green sky, partially obscured by the scudding purple cloud wrack. Even at this distance from the star—just twenty-two million kilometers—you could look straight into its ruddy face without discomfort and count the mottled black-on-red splotches of its starspots. Sky color depended on the angle of the incoming sunlight, and on this world it could be anything from sunset red to a deeply contrasting green.

      A furious wind was blowing, so powerful that had I been there physically, it would have been difficult to stand. I was aware of it in sim because the viewpoint camera was trembling slightly as spray from the ocean whipped past, and the vegetation nearby—short, scrubby growths with feathery black leaves and rubbery stalks—was whipping back and forth, and, during the strongest gusts, lay flat against the ground.

      Bloodworld, you see, is tidally locked with its primary, always turning the same side to face the sun, one hemisphere forever in daylight, the other in darkness. The colony had been established here in the so-called twilight band between day and night; as it circled its star, Bloodworld rocked back and forth, a nodding movement called libration, which resulted in the sun appearing to rise above the horizon for a few days, then setting, the landscape eternally balanced between fire and ice. The planet’s atmosphere—one and half times denser than that at Earth’s surface—expanded rapidly in the middle of the dayside, creating powerful winds blowing from day to night, winds that served to even out the planet’s temperature extremes and keep all of the water and carbon dioxide from freezing out permanently over the nightside.

      The image we were watching this time appeared to be from a handheld recorder, unsteady and with a slightly grainy resolution. Possibly it was from a suitcam, or it could have been an upload from someone’s CDF RAM if they were equipped with the appropriate imaging hardware. There were data overlays at the upper right, green alphanumerics giving range and positional data, speed, temperature, and other information. Unlike three-sixty sims created by VR AIs, you could only look in the direction the camera was aimed, and the view wobbled and bounced as though the person carrying the camera was jogging over uneven ground toward the city, clearly pausing to lean into the wind with the strongest gusts.

      “This vid,” Carter said, “was taken by a Marine Specter probe inserted near the Salvation colony. It subsequently uploaded to an RS-90 off world, which in turn sent a message drone back to Earth. We only received the transmission last night. When the Command Constellation saw it, they ordered the recall.”

      The RS-90 Nightwraith was the Marine Corps’ premiere reconnaissance platform, stealthy, fast, and capable. It would have gone in carrying a number of Specters, robotic recon probes, designed to carry out extensive ground surveillance and transmit data back from the planet’s surface. That explained the data overlays, which weren’t usually a part of civilian vid feeds. They were giving a weather report at the moment—forty-five Celsius—a bit on the warm side—with a wind speed of ninety-two kilometers per hour.

      And then the camera panned to the left, looking out across the seething ocean, then angled up, aiming into the sky, and all I could see was the incoming alien ships.

      There were three of them, polished silver reflecting the bloody light, essentially flattened disks with a central bulge and a bite taken out of the trailing edge. The sides curved downward, like small wings or auxiliary stabilizers. I could only guess at the size, but they looked big for atmospheric vessels—maybe 100 meters or more across. They were using plasma thrusters to lower themselves gently toward the ground, as clouds of tiny glittering craft spilled from vents or ports along their undersides; I could see the swirling clouds of dust being raised by their jet wash as they settled down one after another on the spaceport in the distance. Human figures were running in confusion among the buildings, looking slow and clumsy in heavy environmental suits. The buildings of the colony began exploding one after another, with sharp flashes and fast-expanding pressure waves clearly defined by the thick, wet air. Each blast geysered a cloud of smoke and debris hurtling into the red sky, clouds that then tattered away with the wind.

      The camera jerked and spun; the landscape blurred for an instant with the movement. In another direction, more of the disk vessels were settling to the ground.

      An armored figure appeared: gleaming overlapping segments covering a body several meters long. It might have been as big as an extinct 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