Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One Read Online Free
Author: Ian Douglas
a new one for that little SNAFU—all eight squads pulled it together, deployed without being spotted, and took down their assigned objectives, on sched and by the download. An hour later we had a Hog vectoring in for medevac.
I rode back up to orbit with Colby.
And it was just about then that the fecal matter intercepted the rotational arc of the high-speed turbine blades.
Chapter Two
F or a century now we humans have been lurkers on the Galactic Internet, listening and learning but not saying a word. We’re terrified, you see, that they might find us.
The EG-Net, as near as we can tell, embraces a fair portion of the entire Galaxy, a flat, hundred-thousand-light-year spiral made of four hundred billion suns and an estimated couple of trillion planets. The Net uses modulated gamma-ray lasers, which means, thanks to the snail’s-pace crawl of light, that all of the news is out of date to one degree or another by the time we get it. Fortunately, most of what’s on there doesn’t have an expiration date. The Starlord Empire has been collapsing for the past twenty thousand years, and the chances are good that it’ll still be collapsing twenty thousand years from now.
The Galaxy is a big place. Events big enough to tear it apart take a long time to unfold.
The closest EG transmission beam to Sol passes through the EG Relay at Sirius, where we discovered it during our first expedition to that system 128 years ago. The Sirius Orbital Complex was constructed just to eavesdrop on the Galactics—there’s nothing else worthwhile in the system—and most of what we know about Deep Galactic history comes from there. We call it the EG, the Encyclopedia Galactica, because it appears to be a data repository. Nested within the transmission beams crisscrossing the Galaxy like the web of a drunken spider are data describing hundreds of millions of cultures across at least six billion years, since long before Sol was born or the Earth was even a gleam in an interstellar nebula’s eye. It took us twenty years just to crack the outer codes to learn how to read what we were seeing. And what we’ve learned since represents, we think, something less than 0.01 percent of all of the information available.
But even that microscopic drop within the cosmic ocean is enough to prove just how tiny, how utterly insignificant, we humans are in the cosmic scheme of things.
The revelation shook humankind to its metaphorical core, an earthquake bigger than Copernicus and Galileo, deeper than Darwin, more far-reaching than Hubbell, more astonishing than Randall, Sundrum, and Witten.
And the revelation damn near destroyed us.
“H ey, e-Car!” HM3 Michael C. Dubois held up a lab flask and swirled the pale orange liquid within. “Wanna hit?”
I was just finishing a cup of coffee as I wandered into the squad bay, and still had my mug in hand. I sucked down the dregs and raised the empty cup. “What the hell are you pedaling this time, Doob?” I asked him.
“Nothing but the best for the Black Wizard heroes!”
“Paint stripper,” Corporal Calli Lewis told me, and she made a bitter face. I noticed that she took another swig from her mug, however, before adding, “The bastard’s trying to poison us.”
Doobie Dubois laughed. “Uh-uh. It’s methanol that’ll kill you . . . or maybe make you blind, paralyzed, or impotent. Wood alcohol, CH 3 OH. This here is guaranteed gen-u-wine ethanol , C 2 H 5 OH, straight out of the lab assemblers and mixed with orange juice I shagged from a buddy in the galley. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
“Not necessarily a good thing, at least where Calli’s concerned,” I said as he poured me half a mug.
“Yeah?” he said, and gave Calli a wink. “How do you know? Might be an improvement!”
“Fuck you, squid,” she replied.
“Any time you want, jarhead.”
I took a sip of the stuff and winced. “Good galloping gods , that’s awful!”
“Doc can’t hold his ’shine,” Sergeant
I rode back up to orbit with Colby.
And it was just about then that the fecal matter intercepted the rotational arc of the high-speed turbine blades.
Chapter Two
F or a century now we humans have been lurkers on the Galactic Internet, listening and learning but not saying a word. We’re terrified, you see, that they might find us.
The EG-Net, as near as we can tell, embraces a fair portion of the entire Galaxy, a flat, hundred-thousand-light-year spiral made of four hundred billion suns and an estimated couple of trillion planets. The Net uses modulated gamma-ray lasers, which means, thanks to the snail’s-pace crawl of light, that all of the news is out of date to one degree or another by the time we get it. Fortunately, most of what’s on there doesn’t have an expiration date. The Starlord Empire has been collapsing for the past twenty thousand years, and the chances are good that it’ll still be collapsing twenty thousand years from now.
The Galaxy is a big place. Events big enough to tear it apart take a long time to unfold.
The closest EG transmission beam to Sol passes through the EG Relay at Sirius, where we discovered it during our first expedition to that system 128 years ago. The Sirius Orbital Complex was constructed just to eavesdrop on the Galactics—there’s nothing else worthwhile in the system—and most of what we know about Deep Galactic history comes from there. We call it the EG, the Encyclopedia Galactica, because it appears to be a data repository. Nested within the transmission beams crisscrossing the Galaxy like the web of a drunken spider are data describing hundreds of millions of cultures across at least six billion years, since long before Sol was born or the Earth was even a gleam in an interstellar nebula’s eye. It took us twenty years just to crack the outer codes to learn how to read what we were seeing. And what we’ve learned since represents, we think, something less than 0.01 percent of all of the information available.
But even that microscopic drop within the cosmic ocean is enough to prove just how tiny, how utterly insignificant, we humans are in the cosmic scheme of things.
The revelation shook humankind to its metaphorical core, an earthquake bigger than Copernicus and Galileo, deeper than Darwin, more far-reaching than Hubbell, more astonishing than Randall, Sundrum, and Witten.
And the revelation damn near destroyed us.
“H ey, e-Car!” HM3 Michael C. Dubois held up a lab flask and swirled the pale orange liquid within. “Wanna hit?”
I was just finishing a cup of coffee as I wandered into the squad bay, and still had my mug in hand. I sucked down the dregs and raised the empty cup. “What the hell are you pedaling this time, Doob?” I asked him.
“Nothing but the best for the Black Wizard heroes!”
“Paint stripper,” Corporal Calli Lewis told me, and she made a bitter face. I noticed that she took another swig from her mug, however, before adding, “The bastard’s trying to poison us.”
Doobie Dubois laughed. “Uh-uh. It’s methanol that’ll kill you . . . or maybe make you blind, paralyzed, or impotent. Wood alcohol, CH 3 OH. This here is guaranteed gen-u-wine ethanol , C 2 H 5 OH, straight out of the lab assemblers and mixed with orange juice I shagged from a buddy in the galley. It’ll put hair on your chest.”
“Not necessarily a good thing, at least where Calli’s concerned,” I said as he poured me half a mug.
“Yeah?” he said, and gave Calli a wink. “How do you know? Might be an improvement!”
“Fuck you, squid,” she replied.
“Any time you want, jarhead.”
I took a sip of the stuff and winced. “Good galloping gods , that’s awful!”
“Doc can’t hold his ’shine,” Sergeant
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