Battlespace (28 page)

“I see you, Tremkiss!” he called. “Stay down!”

“I'm hit, Doc!” Tremkiss said. His voice sounded dull, almost detached. “And the Sarge. He's…he's…”

“Just hold on, Private. Help's on the way!”

He dropped down next to the two Marines.
Christ on a crutch
! he thought. Houston's left leg was a mess, the suit shredded, raw and bloody flesh and white bone exposed to hard vacuum, blood trying to bubble even as it congealed and froze. The worst part was the man's frenzied thrashing. His com was out, but he obviously was conscious and in severe pain.

Parts of the crater were still glowing a dull red by visible light, and the whole area was radiating fiercely on infrared. Rolling himself into the crater's shallow embrace, Lee crouched down over Houston, trying to hold him down while slapping his comjack into the man's helmet.

And instantly clicked down the volume as the man's screaming shrilled in his helmet earphones. “Houston! Houston, can you hear me?”

The only response was the Marine's continued screams.

Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time

Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti stood in a circle with the other five men of the engineering detail, watching the nanotunneler slowly settle into the deck. The device, dropped onto the Wheel inside the VBSS airlock, which had been inflated around it, stood half a meter tall and three meters in diameter, a squat, thick, aluminum-gray doughnut with a hollow core and a wall fifty centimeters thick. The bottom end of the device was a seething, boiling mass of some trillions of nanomachines, each a bit larger than a human red blood cell, each capable of taking a minute chunk of whatever inert material it came in contact with and converting it into another nanomachine.

The tunneling process started slowly, but as more and more newborn nanos came online, the digging accelerated. How long it would take depended on the density of the substrate, and on the thickness of the Wheel's outer hull at this point.

He read the data off his helmet display. One hundred thirty-one centimeters so far, after four minutes of digging. And the test cores had indicated a thickness here of 4.85 meters. At that rate, and with straight-line data, the process would take another two and a half hours before they broke through. Fortunately, that time would come down as the digging speeded up. Giotti didn't have enough data yet to determine just how sharp the acceleration curve was going to be.

Shit. It would be faster to have the fly-guys or the Navy pound the spot until they created a five-meter-deep crater…except for the fact that no one knew what the effects of such an attack would be on the Wheel and especially on those lit
tle black holes that were supposed to be whizzing around down in the depths of this thing. The idea was to capture the Wheel
intact
, if possible.

“Let's inject some more
e
-movers,” he suggested. “Ten percent.”

“Up ten percent, aye aye,” Corporal Moskowitz replied from the other side of the disk. E-movers were a specialized form of nanomachine that converted substrate material into energy, stored it, and transferred it back up the pipe to the mechanism that was creating the basic diggers. Increasing the flow of energy would increase the rate of nanoproduction…but within carefully balanced limits. Try to speed the process too much and the tunneler would choke on too many diggers, or stall because there were too many e-movers and not enough diggers.

Balancing the two was part of the extensive engineering download he and the others had received during the week before their departure from Earth. They were all too aware that the equations had been created on Earth, using Earthly test materials, and that no one really knew how well they would work on a structure built by an alien civilization at a star almost nine light-years distant.

“Giotti!” Warhurst's voice called over his comm channel. “How long?”

Shit. He took the data he had, extrapolated the curve of dig-rate increase, and came up with a figure of twenty-five more minutes. Not bad…but it was still an only somewhat educated guess. He added fifty percent and rounded up, just to be sure.

“Forty-five more minutes, sir,” he replied. “And that is definitely a HAG.”

HAG. A hairy-assed guess.

He could do no better than that.

AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time

Forty-five fucking minutes
!…

There was no way they were going to hold the enemy forces that long. The hostiles had already breached the Marine perimeter in two places. Dozens of the things had been knocked out by Onager fire, by close air support, and finally by CCN-guided concentrated fire of individual Marine rifle squads. The second perimeter was forming up inside the first, but there was no reason to think they would have any greater success in stopping those monsters.

Toughest for Warhurst was the realization, the clear and firm knowledge, that he'd done everything he could, deployed his troops the best he could, taken every precaution he could take…and still that wasn't enough. There was nothing else he
could
do now, save trust in the fighting ability and determination of his Marines.

“General Ramsey,” he said over the command link. “Warhurst. They're through the perimeter, at Milwaukee and at Cincinnati.”

“I see it. What's your assessment?”

“‘The issue is still in doubt.'”

In December of 1942, a detachment of 449 U.S. Marines on Wake Island had held off a vastly superior Japanese invasion force for two weeks. As two thousand Japanese special landing force troops stormed ashore, the last radio message received from the garrison read:
Enemy on island. Issue still in doubt.

Warhurst was feeling a bit like Major James Devereaux must had felt on Wake during those final hours. What do you do when there's nothing left to do, and the enemy is kicking in your front door?

“Understood,” Ramsey told him. “Just remember. Devereaux took out eight hundred enemy troops, twenty-one air
craft, and four warships before he was through. Do what you can, then get out of the way and let your Marines do what
they
can.”

It was as though the general was reading his mind. “Aye aye, sir.”

He didn't ask about evacuation. Ramsey would be positioning the TRAPs for pickup if they decided they had to get everyone off the Wheel. That was Ramsey's decision, however, not his.

And the enemy advance
was
slowing. As more and more of the Wheel combat vehicles were destroyed, more were arriving from elsewhere…but slowly.

Maybe, if they killed enough of the things, killed them fast enough…

HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time

Lying halfway across his struggling patient, Lee grabbed a nanodyne Frahlich Probe from his pouch and slipped the needle through the man's armor at a point on the shoulder where it was relatively thin. He let the needle settle through the armor, then rammed the device home, letting the silver shaft of the needle seal itself airtight to the polylaminate material surrounding it. A green light at the tip winked safe and he felt the datalink connection through his implant. He selected a level four programming, and thought-clicked the injector's firing mechanism.

Houston kept screaming and all Lee could do was try to hold him down. Damn, he wished this was “Misery Mike,” not a human being…not someone he'd known and talked
with over the mess table. The guy was in agony….

The Marine's screaming dragged on for a few moments more, but then turned ragged and began to subside. A level four program was as aggressive as he could make it without knocking the man out…and he didn't want to do that until he knew it wouldn't kill the guy. The nanodyne injected through the Frahlich Probe filtered rapidly through his body by way of the bloodstream, seeking out nerve bundles that were in the spasmodic and continual firing that indicated severe pain and shutting them down, both near the wounds and in the brain itself. Parts of the man's body would go numb, but his mind should stay reasonably alert and without the shrieking pain.

As the nanodyne took effect, Lee was already working on the leg, using a beam scalpel to slice away torn armor, flesh, and bone.

Scalpel
was something of a misnomer. It was the largest cutter in Lee's armamentarium, more of a high-voltage Bowie knife than a surgical instrument. As he sliced through frozen clots, fresh blood began boiling from the wound, along with a jet of air white with freezing water vapor.

He remembered that training exercise on the Mare Imbrium, how he'd let the sunlight melt the bloody ice that had partially sealed the simulated wound on “Misery Mike.” That situation didn't apply here. Both of the Sirian suns were on the other side of the Wheel, making this the nightside, and at this distance, they wouldn't warm things above freezing anyway.

In any case, the damage to both the armor and to the Marine inside were too extensive for him to worry about breaking scabs. Mingled air and blood were boiling from the patient in a steady stream that flashed into vapor and frozen clots of ice as soon as it hit vacuum.

Marine armor had guillotine irises installed at the knees and elbows; the idea was that a serious injury to the extremities
could be sealed off with a single, sharp slice that minimized both blood and air loss. There was also the inner memory plastic layer that sealed itself against the patient's body.

The blast that had caught Houston, though, had thoroughly shredded much of his left leg all the way up the groin and there was extensive burn damage, it looked like, to the man's left side as well. The damage to Houston's suit and body was far too extensive for the suit's own damage control systems to more than slow the steady loss of both air pressure and blood. Mark VIII vac armor was good, but it couldn't work miracles.

For that you needed a trained man.

The most serious problem at the moment was bleeding from the femoral artery, the major blood vessel running from a branching of the aorta deep within the torso, through the groin, and down into the leg. Houston could bleed to death in
seconds
if Lee couldn't seal it off.

There was no time for finesse. Lee sliced away the last of the chopped up armor and leg with the scalpel, dropped the instrument, and pulled out a cautery. Probing with the flat blade, he pressed it through the bright red blood bubbling into vacuum and pressed the trigger.

He had to do everything by feel and by trained guesswork. There was too much blood and ice for him to actually
see
what he was doing. As the blade glowed red hot, however, the major blood flow slowed, then stopped. He kept moving the blade around, sealing off all of the open blood vessels he could reach.

An irreverent thought surfaced as he worked. Part of the downloaded portion of his training, of course, included a detailed history of medicine. The French surgeon Ambroise Pare—who'd first introduced amputation as a battlefield surgical procedure in the early 1500s—had in 1572 begun using silk ligatures to tie off bleeding arteries instead of searing them shut with a red-hot iron. Seven hundred years later, bat
tlefield surgery had come full circle. Probing for spurters with a hemostat or, worse, trying to suture a wound shut, was at best damned tough while wearing armor gauntlets; trying to do it when the wound was masked by a geyser of freezing vapor was impossible. A hot iron would stop the bleeding far more effectively in this environment than more civilized measures.

It took several more minutes, but he thought that Houston's condition was stabilizing.

As he worked, he kept trying to talk to the wounded man. “Houston! Houston, can you hear me? Stay with me, man!”

“Wha…whazzit?”

He could hear the Marine's rasping, fast, and shallow breathing. His blood pressure was dangerously low, his heartbeat fast and fluttering.

“Houston! Stay awake! It's me, Doc! We're going to get you out of this.”

“D-doc? Wha…happened?…”

The data link to Houston's suit showed the Marine's suit pressure was dropping fast, so as soon as he thought he had the bleeding stopped, he slapped a generous glob of nanogel over the open stump. Air was leaking from the suit torso as well, where armor and flesh had charred together under a high-temperature blast. He could do nothing about that here, save inject some more medical nano programmed for burn treatment through the Frahlich Probe and cover the mess over with nanogel.

Only then could he spare a thought for Private Tremkiss.

The man's right leg was missing from the knee down, neatly sealed off by his suit's guillotine feature. “How are you doing, Tremkiss?” he asked. “Any pain?”

“N-no, sir.”

“I'm not a ‘sir,'” he said, giving the time-honored response of Navy petty officers and Marine NCOs. “I work for a living. Let me jack in.”

The suit's memory showed Tremkiss losing a foot to a
near-miss plasma blast. The guillotine had sealed off the limb to prevent catastrophic pressure loss; the suit's built-in field first-aid system had kicked in and fired nanodyne and sealer into the wound. No blood loss, no real pain…and though Tremkiss was on the ragged edge of both physical and emotional shock, he was holding his own for the moment.

“You think you can move, son?”

“I don't know. I…don't think so.”

“Hang on. We're going to get both of you out of here.”

That unquestionably was the next step, vamming both patients—and himself—out of here.

“Memphis, this is Mike one-one.” The handle identified him as Alpha Company, First Platoon's medical asset. “I've got two casualties, repeat, two casualties in downtown Cincinnati. Number one is massive burn, trauma and blood loss. Suit is plugged and wounds are stable. Monitor operational. Number two is suit-maintained but nonmobile. We need emergency evac, stat.”