Bloodstar

“So what’s the celebration?” I asked Dubois. He always had a reason for breaking out the lab-nanufactured drinkables.

“The end of FMF training, of course! What’d you think?”

I took another cautious sip. It actually wasn’t too bad. Maybe that first swig had killed off the nerve endings.

“You’re one-eighty off course, Doob,” I told him. “We still have Europa, remember?”

FMF—the Fleet Marine Force—was arguably the most coveted billet in the entire U.S. Navy Hospital Corps. To win that silver insignia for your collar, you needed to go through three months of Marine training at Lejeune or Pendleton, then serve with the Marines for one year, pass their physical, demonstrate a daunting list of Marine combat and navigation skills, and pass a battery of tests, both written and in front of a senior enlisted board.

I’d been in FMF training since I’d made Third Class a year ago; our assignment on board the Clymer was the final phase of our training, culminating in the Ocher Sands fun and games that had us performing a live insertion and taking part in a Marine planetary assault. After this, we were supposed to deploy to Europa for three weeks of practical xenosophontology, swimming with the Medusae. After that, those of us still with the program would take our boards, and if we were lucky, only then would we get to append the letters FMF after our name and rank.

“Not the way I heard it, e-Car,” he said. He took a swig of his product straight from the flask. “Scuttlebutt has it we’re deploying I-S.”

I ignored use of the disliked handle. My name, Elliot Carlyle, had somehow been twisted into “e-Car.” Apparently there was a law of the Corps that said everyone had to have a nickname. Doob. Lewis was “Louie.” I’d spent the past year trying to get myself accepted as “Hawkeye,” a nod both to James Fenimore Cooper and to a twentieth-century entertainment series about military medical personnel in the field from which I’d downloaded a few low-res 2-D episodes years ago.

“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 10

bits

Data Storage/Transmission DS/T: 2.91 x 10

s

Biological Code: 786.985.965

Genome: 4.2 x 10

bits; Coding/non-coding: 0.019.

Biology: C, N, O, S, S

, Ca, Cu, Se, H

O, PO

TNA

Diferrous hemerythrin proteins in C

H

COOH circulatory fluid.

Mobile heterotrophs, carnivores, O

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 10

T = ~300

to 470

K; M = 4.3 x 10

g; L: ~5.5 x 10

s