by Ian Douglas
“Lies! Lies and slander! But actually, I had something a little different in mind . . . something along the lines of the Free Fall.”
My eyebrows went up. “I dunno, Doob. That’s pretty rich for my blood.”
The Free Fall Lounge was definitely a half dozen points higher on the classy-meter than the Earthview . . . an exotic play-lounge more for Geosynch’s rich civilian tourists up from Earth than for the likes of us. It costs ten e-creds just to walk in the main access hatch, fifteen for a cheap drink, and some of the meals on the menu would cost a third class most of a week’s pay. If you’ve got a hot date along, though, there’s nothing like the hydrosphere.
At least, that’s what I’d heard. I’d never been to the place, and never expected to go.
“Aw, c’mon, e-Car! You deserve it! We all do! I’ll round up some of the other guys, and we’ll have a real hyperbolic blowout to celebrate.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you’ll have to treat me with more respect, Doob. I outrank you now.”
In fact, Doobie had passed his test for HM2 and was on the promotions list, but it wouldn’t take effect until next February. They’d made my promotion effective as of that day, as a part of the medal ceremony. I had that long to lord it over Doob before his promotion took effect.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Doob replied, and I realized I also had that long to endure his sarcasm. “Treat the newbie petty officer second class with all due courtesy and respect, sir!”
“Right,” I said. “So . . . we’ve got three months of this nonsense to go through, huh?”
The Free Fall wasn’t a part of the Wheel, which used the Space Elevator as its rotational axis, but was part of an independent orbital facility—the Hilton Synchorbital. You got there by boarding a fling pod on the rim of the main wheel, which cut you loose with a tangential velocity of just less than 47 meters per second at precisely the right instant so that you drifted into the embrace of a rotating catcher at your destination twenty minutes later in free orbit, 940 meters distant. The receiving catcher snagged the fling pod in a magnetic field, brought it to rest, then maneuvered it into the Hilton’s receiving lock, which provided transport cars up to the zero-gravity lobby.
You entered the Free Fall through the hotel lobby, moving hand over hand out into the sphere at one pole of its axis. The Free Fall was an immense globe, fifty meters across and rotating once every fifteen seconds to provide a respectable four tenths of a G around its equator—a shade more than the surface gravity of Mars. The sphere’s poles, of course, remained in zero-G, but your weight slowly climbed as you rode one of the inclines down the inside curve toward the equator. The equatorial region, from about latitude 30˚ north to 30˚ south on the sphere’s inside surface, was where the chairs and tables were, with one part closed off to hide the kitchen and other support facilities. There was a nicely appointed bar as well, and a lot of soft lighting and lush tropical vegetation that gave it the look of a magical jungle, a green maze within which groups of tables were nestled, with flowing streams and small ponds and waterfalls. Genengineered koi swam in the larger ponds, their scales shimmering with constantly changing iridescence. At the higher latitudes, large viewall panels looked out into space and the spinning moon, sun, stars, and Earth, and you could look “up” across the sphere’s interior to the other side, to see diners calmly enjoying their drinks or diners upside down relative to you.
But the big attraction, of course, was the hydrosphere.
The hub of the Free Fall sphere is in zero-gravity—well, microgravity is the correct term, but everything at Geosynch is in free fall around the Earth, completing one orbit in twenty-four hours. Farther down the space elevator, you actually feel weight, because you’re moving slower than is necessary to stay in orbit. If you were to step out of an airlock you would take a very long fall straight down to the Earth. Above Synchorbit, on the other hand, the centripetal force of the elevator is trying to throw everything out into space, since the upper half of the structure is traveling faster than it needs to move in order to stay in orbit, and is, therefore, whipping around the Earth like a ball on the end of a whirling string. The ball, in this case, is a small asteroid anchored 35,000 kilometers farther out, providing the dynamic tension that locks the elevator system in place and keeps it stretched out taut. Geosynch, orbiting at exactly 35,786 kilometers above Mount Cayambe, in Ecuador, is at the halfway point, balanced between falling down and falling up, and so remains at zero-G.
Which is what made the Free Fall’s hydrosphere possible. It was about ten meters across, a bubble of water floating at the exact center of the larger sphere which rotated around it four times a minute. The water, warmed to 40˚C, was kept hot, fresh and circulating by inflow and outflow piping coming into it along the larger sphere’s axis. Internal lighting gave it a shifting, constantly changing illumination—pink mingled with an emerald green. Waves and ripples constantly spread across its surface, adding to the exotic and ever-changing lighting patterns across the larger sphere’s inner surfaces.
And people were swimming in it. Swimming, and . . . other things.
There were eight of us in the liberty party—me, Doobie, and Machine McKean; Carla Harper and HM3 George Gomez, both from Clymer’s medlab; HM2 Kari Harris and HM3 Tomas Esteban, from Clymer’s medical cryo unit; and HN Ken Klinginsmith, from Medical Imaging. Doob said he’d also invited Chief Garner, but the company’s senior Corpsman had pled more pressing duties.
That was just as well; even within the Hospital Corps, which tends not to be as formally rank conscious as the rest of the Navy, chief petty officers are both a law and a social order unto themselves. A chief, not to put too fine a point on it, is God—exactly the same as a gunnery sergeant in the Marines. We would all be a little freer, a little more comfortable, if Garner wasn’t there with us.
But we did have the three rifle-company Corpsmen, plus the lab, cryo, and MI techs. It promised to be a hell of a party.
We all wore civvies—conservatively dark, two-toned skinsuits for the gents, and formal glittersprays for the ladies. Carla was wearing blue light as well, for a formal-gown effect, but Kari had left her breasts bare, which allowed for some very nice things to happen to her anatomy while we were moving in zero-G.
A human hostess met us at the incline and led us to a table. Like the Earthview, this place had a human waitstaff, part of what made it so pricey. I honestly couldn’t tell if she was wearing a high-tech skinsuit, a light coating of programmed nano, or animated tattoos, but her skin color kept rippling and shifting through shades and dappled patterns of sunlight and green, in keeping with the rain-forest theme of the place.
A waiter in similar camouflage took our orders. “What will you ladies and gentlemen have?” he asked. The rotation of the Free Fall meant that sunlight spilled through each set of viewalls in turn, creating an ever-shifting patchwork of light and shadow, and his skin appeared to be responding to the changing light.
Remembering how good that drink at the Earthview had been, I ordered a hyperbolic trajectory.
“So,” Klinginsmith said, “you all hear the latest scuttlebutt?”
“About what?” Doob asked. Rumors were always flying on board ship, and even more so at bases like the Geosynch Starport, where you had a lot more input of gossip, rumor, and wild speculation.
“The Commonwealth is going to take down the Qesh at Bloodworld!”
“Says who?” I asked. I was skeptical. The Jackers had been in that system in major force, big-time. It was going to take a major invasion fleet to knock them loose from the place.
“Just a girl I know up in Ops,” Kling said with an affected nonchalance. “She’s on the TT.”
“The Tactical Team?” Esteban asked, and then he shrugged. “Fuck, those guys are always running sims on possible operations. Just in case, y’know? Doesn’t mean shit.”
“That’s right,” Harris said. She giggled. “They p
robably run sims for a Navy-Marine invasion of Earth every morning, just for practice!”
“Why wouldn’t we send an invasion force to the Gliese 581?” Harper asked. “I mean . . . those are people on Bloodworld. Humans! And the Qesh are doing horrible things to them!”
“I’m not so sure about that, Carla,” I said. “The Salvation government was working with the Qesh. It was the militant rebels who we saw being tortured.”
“But they were being tortured,” Harper insisted. “The Commonwealth has to go in and save them!”
“Actually, no,” Doob said. “Unless there’s some sort of treaty or agreement in place, we can’t go in unless we’re specifically invited.”
“That’s right,” Harris said. “We might call Bloodworld a colony, but it’s not, really—not in a political sense. It doesn’t belong to the Commonwealth, and we don’t have a say in how they choose to govern themselves.”
“The only reason we went out there at all,” Gomez added, “is because Earthport was afraid the Qesh were going to find out where Earth is.”
Earthport—better known as Porto de la Tierra—sprawled across the Andes at the bottom of the space elevator; it had been the capital of the Commonwealth government ever since New York City and the old UN had become so cold that the delegates voted to move.
“Well, I still don’t think it’s right,” Harper said.
I was about to say something to Harper about “right,” but changed my mind. Carla Harper was a sweet gal, full of fun and, if some of Doobie’s squad-bay anecdotes were to be believed, fun to fill. But she had some strange ideas about how the world, how the universe, actually worked.
“So who gives a shit about right?” Harris said, laughing, saying the same thing I’d almost said.
“ ‘Right’ doesn’t have anything to do with it, Carla,” Klinginsmith added. “Still, Earthport’s found some reason to go in.”
“Well, you know, Kling-on, I’ll believe that when I download the orders,” McKean said. “There’s just no reason for us to tangle with the bastards, y’know?”
Our waiter showed up with our drinks. Our table asked us for e-creds, and we fed it from our in-heads. The hyperbolic trajectory here didn’t have quite as much of a kick as the one at Earthview, but that was a good thing. I wanted to stay conscious and upright through more than three drinks tonight.
I took a sip, then heard a loud shriek and splash from twenty meters overhead and looked up. Someone had just jumped in, caroming into the water in a cannonball. Particularly spectacular splashes in the hydrosphere could send water droplets flying out toward the restaurant floor. Most were intercepted by the vegetation, but occasionally you felt a gentle mist falling at your table. It added to the tropical ambiance.
“Well, there is one good reason for us to go back out there,” I said, taking a second sip from my drink. I’d been thinking about it for weeks, now, and didn’t like my conclusions.
“Yeah?” Esteban said. “What’s that?”
“The Qesh are now twenty light years from Earth,” I told them. “Maybe Earthport decided they were just too damned close.”
“How do you figure that, e-Car?” Doob wanted to know.
I told them about the reconstruction I’d done with Clymer’s navigation software, how it looked like the Qesh had been running some sort of long-term search pattern across the sky, quite possibly looking for us. “They’ve known we were out here somewhere in this general volume of space ever since they ran into the Zeng He,” I concluded. “That was, what? Sixty years ago?”
“I don’t buy it,” McKean said. “You’re talking about a volume of space a hundred light years across—that’s a hundred million cubic light years . . . maybe, what? Two hundred thousand stars? That’s not a needle in a haystack. It’s more like a drop in the ocean.”
“What the hell’s a haystack, anyway?” Klinginsmith wanted to know.
“It’s highstack,” Esteban told him. “An old slang term for the space elevator.”
“Well,” I said, “they don’t have to stop and look at every star.”
“Maybe not,” Gomez said. “But sixty years to get from ninety-something light years out to twenty? That’s not a search. That’s a slow amble, slow enough to enjoy the scenery.”
“Yeah, e-Car,” Dubois said. “If they were searching for us, they would have found us a few weeks after Gamma Oph.”
“The fact remains,” I said, stubborn, “they’re only twenty lights away now. And if they decide to come in and check out the local node for the Encyclopedia Galactica . . . well, that’s at Sirius.”
“Shit, he’s right,” Gomez said. “The Sirius library node is designed to attract attention. And we have the big research complex there.”
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “Look.”
Our table had a 3-D projector built into it. I accessed the system and uploaded a small interactive graphic I’d been playing with. Stars appeared in a sphere hovering above our drinks. A red star at one side winked red.
“Gliese 581, right? Twenty point three light years away.” A straight white line connected the red star with a yellow near the center of the projection sphere. “Sirius is here.” A white star flared brightly on the opposite side of Sol from Bloodstar, slightly offset from the white-line axis. I drew a blue line from Bloodstar toward Sirius, extending it past Sol.
“See?” I went on. “To get to Sirius from Bloodworld, they’d have to pass real close to Sol. Five point seven light years—I did the math. Spitting distance . . . assuming Qesh spit.”
“Shit,” Dubois said, staring into the projection globe. “They’d be just about certain to pick up IR and RF leakage from our civilization.”
A couple of centuries ago, there’d been a lot of talk about the dangers of radio and television broadcasts spreading out through local space and alerting anyone out there who might be listening. The idea was that hostile aliens might pick up reruns of old-style TV and radio programs and home in on Earth. Once we started listening in on the EG and found out about all of the predarian cultures spreading out in the wake of the collapse of the R’agch’lgh Collective, the worry over hostile ETs discovering Earth became even worse.
Well, that’s the newsfeeds for you—vividly sensationalist and often inaccurate. In fact, research had already shown that modulated radio signals tend to degrade over a relatively short distance, thinning out as the volume of space they fill increases and becoming nothing more than white noise in as little as a light year or two, a fraction of the distance to the nearest star.
But that detectable distance is not a hard line. Exactly how far out it lies from the sun depends on the technology of the receiver. I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t willing to bet my planet on the Qesh not being able to pull some information out of noise at a range of, oh, six light years, say. At twenty light years, getting anything at all out of the background hash was probably impossible—which was why the pre-interstellar searches for extraterrestrial civilizations were so disappointing. At some point between about one and ten light years, any remaining data is irretrievably lost in the white-noise racket coming from the rest of the Galaxy.
But what about a distance of less than 6 light years? We couldn’t be sure about that. At certain radio wavelengths, our Solar System shines—not from old television transmissions, or even from modern Net communications, most of which are tight-beam anyway, but from high-energy radar—especially military radar—as well as asteroid trackers, navigation beacons, and the radio traffic among the system colonies. And at infrared wavelengths, our deep-space industrial complexes stand out like an anomalous cluster of tiny, hot, IR stars.
Yeah, chances were very good that the Qesh would spot us if they happened to be passing by on their way to the Sirius library node.
“Well, I don’t know about you guys,” Harris said as I switched off the projection, “but I didn�
��t come here to talk shop! Let’s eat!”
“Second the motion,” Gomez said, slapping his palm down on one of the table’s interface panels. “They have real food here!”
Genuine meat was hellishly expensive here, since it had to be shipped “up-el” from South America. Cultured meat, grown in the nanufactories there at Geosynch, was less so . . . costing only an arm instead of an arm and a leg. The problem was that I knew where a lot of the carbon and other organics in the growth vats came from. While I was rationally aware that the stuff was completely sterile—carbon atoms are carbon atoms no matter where you get them from, and we’re talking about the complete nanodisassembly of waste products, here—I’d always felt a bit squeamish about that sort of thing. My father always said I was atavistic—and as I think about it, I suppose my foible is as weird in its way as the Salvationists rejecting nanomeds.
The hell of it is, guess where a lot of the food we eat on board ship comes from, or the rations we carry with us in the field? I generally try not to think about that part.
But at the Free Fall, I decided I could indulge both in my foible and in a real celebration, so I ordered the unicorn filet with hydroponic tots and veggies. I’d had unicorn once in my life—when I completed my primary download series—and I’d loved it. It was just about the sweetest genengineered protein-on-the-hoof available.
The price tag made me go a bit faint as the blood drained from my brain to my eccount—eC78.90—but, hey, what the hell? I’d been living on shipboard crap for weeks, and the promotion to second class brought a nice boost in the pay. Why not?
I was about to upload my order when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Hey!” Doob said, looking past me. “Look who’s here!”
It was Sergeant Joy Leighton. She was in a dressy skintight with animated iridescence flowing up and down and around her curves, and she looked stunning. “No-Joy!”
