Bloodstar. Ian Douglas

      “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 = ~300^o to 470^o 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

      P_d = 3.2 x 10⁷s, G = 25.81 m/s²

      Atm: O₂ 26.4, N₂ 69.2, CO₂ 2.5, CO 2.1, SO₂ 0.7, at 2.5 x 10⁵ Pa

      Librarian’s note: First direct human contact occurred in 2188 C.E. at Gamma Ophiuchi. Primary culture now appears to be nomadic predarian, and is extremely dangerous. Threat level = 1.

      We’d all downloaded the data on the Qesh, of course, as part of our Marine training. Know your enemy and all of that. Humans had first run into them fifty-nine years ago, when the Zeng He, a Chinese exploration vessel, encountered them while investigating a star system ninety-some light years from Sol. The Zeng He’s AI managed to get off a microburst transmission an instant before the ship was reduced to its component atoms. The signal was picked up a few years later by a Commonwealth vessel in the area and taken back to Earth, where it was studied by the Encyclopedian Library at the Mare Crisium facility on the moon. The Zeng He’s microburst had contained enough data to let us find the Qesh in the ocean of information within the Encylopedia Galactica and learn a bit about them.

      We knew they were part of the R’agch’lgh Collective, the Galactic Empire, as the news media insisted on calling it. We knew they were from a high-gravity world, that they were big, fast, and mean.

      And with the ongoing collapse of the Collective, we knew they’d become predarians.

      The net media had come up with that word, a blending of the words predators and barbarians. That was unfortunate, since in our culture barbarian implies a relatively low technology; you expect them to be wearing shaggy skins, horned helmets, and carrying whopping big swords in their primary manipulators, looking for someone to pillage.

      As near as we could tell, they were predators, both genetically and by psychological inclination. Their societal code, JKRS—which is where “Jackers,” one of their popular nicknames, had come from—suggested that their dominant culture was organized along clan/family lines, that they’d evolved from carnivorous hunters, that they considered themselves to be warriors and possessed what might be called a warrior ethos, and, perhaps the most chilling, that they possessed an essentially Darwinian worldview—survival of the fittest, the strong deserve to live. The fact that their technological level allowed them to accelerate asteroid-sized rocks to near-c and slam them into a planet was a complementary extra.

      These guys had planet-killers.

      The Crisium librarians thought—guessed would be the more accurate term—that the Qesh constituted some sort of military elite within the R’agch’lgh Collective, a kind of palace guard or special assault unit used to take out worlds or entire species that the Collective found to be obstreperous or inconvenient. But with the fall of the Collective, the Qesh were thought to have gone freelance, wandering the Galaxy in large war fleets taking what they wanted and generally trying to prove that they were the best, the strongest, the fittest—something like a really sadistic playground bully without adult supervision.

      That change of status must have been fairly recent—within the last couple of thousand years or so. According to the EG, they were still working for the Collective.

      And for all we knew maybe some of them were, way off, deep in toward the Galactic Core, where the R’agch’lgh might still be calling the shots. Our local branch of the EG Library hadn’t been updated for five thousand years, however, and evidently a lot had happened in the meantime.

      The Galaxy was going through a period of cataclysmic change, but from our limited perspective, it was all taking place in super-slow motion.

      “What,” I said. “The Qesh are coming here?”

      “My friend in Personnel,” Lewis said, “told me there’d been a call for help from one of our colonies. The colony is supposed to be pre-Protocol, so …” She shrugged. “Send in the Marines.”

      It made sense, in a horrific kind of way. Commonwealth Contact Protocol had been developed in 2194, and it laid out very strict rules and regs governing contact with new species. Partially, that was to protect the new species, of course. Human history has a long and bloody tradition of one culture stumbling into a new and eradicating it, through disease, through greed, through conquest, through sheer, bloody-minded stupidity.

      But even more it was to protect us. We were just at the very beginning of our explorations into the Galaxy, and there were Things out there we didn’t understand and which didn’t understand us—or they didn’t care, or they simply saw us as a convenient source of raw materials. Over the course of the past fifty