Bloodstar

Bloodstar
Ian Douglas

Big, bold military science fiction action from one of the genre’s biggest names.In the 23rd Century, war is still hell…Corpsman Eliot Carlyle joined the Navy to save lives and see the universe. Now, he and Bravo Company’s Black Wizards of the interstellar Fleet Marine Force are en route to Bloodworld – a hellish, volatile rock, colonized by the fanatical Salvationists who desired an inhospitable world where they could suffer for humanity’s sins. However, their penance could prove fatal – for the mysterious alien race known as the Qesh have just made violent, bloody first contact.Suddenly, countless lives depend upon Bravo Company as the Marines prepare to confront a vast force of powerful, inscrutable enemies that unless stopped threaten the fate of homeworld Earth itself. And one dedicated medic, singled out by an extraordinary act of valour, will find himself with an astounding opportunity to alter the universe forever…

As always, now and forever,Brea

Table of Contents

Title Page (#u8d2a632f-e3c0-5965-8a9d-7c452b4f4fe4)

Dedication (#u16f90318-3a6b-52d1-a5a4-4362582d34fe)

The Qesh were solidly in control. (#u92056d5a-88fb-544c-9506-859664f3b992)

Chapter One (#ud344b36a-dae1-59ea-8842-8dd89359d4fa)

Chapter Two (#u5fe57270-6c76-5653-b0b9-8abb6c49d802)

Chapter Three (#ua32b5110-b5c5-579d-8581-139a044eba27)

Chapter Four (#uc396e156-bca2-5ec7-8098-cf34bb3fb778)

Chapter Five (#u369656b1-166d-543a-bd6c-e7d02dd2458c)

Chapter Six (#u6ea46376-5a06-5b10-9ab7-cf412786ac77)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Star Corpsman Timeline (#litres_trial_promo)

Star Corpsman Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)

By Ian Douglas (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

The Qesh were solidly in control.

There were armed guards standing at several busy intersections, and small groups of them patrolled the corridors like cops on a beat. The humans we saw watched the patrolling Qesh with expressions ranging from boredom to terror; no one tried to talk with the invaders, and for their part, the invaders didn’t seem predisposed to interfere with the human crowd.

About ten minutes passed before we started getting signal breakup, and then the image dissolved into pixels and winked out. The transmission, shifting around randomly across tens of thousands of frequencies each second, probably couldn’t be monitored by the Qesh, but it could be blocked, by tens of meters of solid rock if nothing else. What we received before that happened, though, had been useful.

And disturbing. If the humans were cooperating with the Qesh, had they already given the invaders access to their computer records?

Had the Qesh already learned the location of Earth?

And how could we find out if they had?

Chapter One

I’M JUST GLAD I’M NOT AFRAID OF HEIGHTS.

Well, at least not much.

Our Cutlass hit atmosphere at something like 8 kilometers per second, bleeding off velocity in a blaze of heat and ionization, the sharp deceleration clamping down on my chest like a boa constrictor with a really bad attitude. I hadn’t been able to see much at that point, and most of my attention was focused simply on breathing.

But then the twelve-pack cut loose, and my insert pod went into free fall. I was thirty kilometers up, high enough that I could see the curve of the planet on my optical feed: a sharp-edged slice of gold-ocher at the horizon, with a deep, seemingly bottomless purple void directly below. We were skimming in toward the dawn with all of the aerodynamic efficiency of falling bricks. The Cutlass scratched a ruler-straight contrail through the black above our heads, scattering chaff to help conceal our drop from enemy radar and lidar assets on the ground.

The problem with a covert insertion is that the covert part is really, really hard to pull off. The bad guys can see you coming from the gods know how far away, and you tend to make a lot of noise, figuratively speaking, when you hit atmosphere.

But that’s what the U.S. Marines—and specifically Bravo Company, 1