by Ian Douglas
“Not tonight, e-Car,” she told me. “Tonight it’s Joy.”
“When did they let you out?” I asked. She’d been transferred from Clymer’s cryo unit to the Naval Medical Hospital at Geosynch when we’d returned to port. I’d heard that they’d successfully regrown her spinal cord and put her ribs and vertebrae back together, but hadn’t learned anything more, save that she was “prognosis favorable.”
“Just this morning,” she said. “That’s why I couldn’t attend the ceremony. They were still checking me out in the big med scanner.”
“How are you doing?” I gave her a quick optical examination—purely professional, of course. “How’s your back?”
She turned, twisting, her movement sending a cascade of color rippling delightfully across the curves of her hips and buttocks. “Good as new!”
“Osteofusion is a good thing,” I said. They would have knitted the broken bones together with nanobots, then literally grown new bone over them molecule by molecule, cementing the fragments into place.
“You’re a good thing, Doc,” she said, twinkling. “They told me what you did. I wish I could have been there this morning when you got your medal!”
“The medal’s nothing,” I said, shrugging.
She considered me for a moment, then reached out and took my hand. “How about a swim?” she asked.
There was no possible way I could have said no.
Chapter Twenty-One
Joy led me up the incline to the Free Fall’s north pole. At that point, we were in zero-gravity, and we had a choice. There were hand-overs along the inflow-outflow piping leading into the glistening, rippling sphere of water twenty meters away, in toward the center, but there was also a broad, round platform encircling the entrance to the rotating sphere, a kind of porch or balcony giving access to the restaurant inclines, but also allowing the more daring patrons in the place to enter the water by means of a long, high dive.
“Game for a jump?” she asked me.
“If you are,” I said. I was feeling less than certain, though. I don’t like heights, though I can’t say I actually fear them. From our vantage point up there on the polar porch, the inner surface of the Free Fall dropped away on all sides, with the floor at the equator thirty-five meters away and rotating fairly rapidly around the center, once in about every fifteen seconds.
Though we couldn’t feel up or down there, with our feet on the porch, the hydrosphere glowed and shimmered directly “above” us. “So what happens if we miss?” I asked.
“Nets,” she said, pointing past the hydrosphere. They were hard to see—nearly invisible above the jungle—but they’d rigged fine-mesh netting to catch jumpers whose aim was so bad that they missed the water. The target, the ten-meter rippling sphere of pink-and-green water, was actually pretty big, spanning about 23 degrees across the Free Fall’s center, but swimmers who’d had too much alcohol or were otherwise impaired might easily misjudge angles or become disoriented.
Joy touched a spot on her left wrist, and the shimmering iridescence covering her body disappeared, the minute particles going inert and drifting away in the air. It had been a nano coating after all. She floated there in front of me, gloriously nude, wonderfully inviting. Damn, she had to be the most gorgeous Marine I’d ever seen.
“Well?” she asked, and that twinkle returned.
I touched a pressure point on my skinsuit, up just beneath the hollow of my throat, and the fabric gently dissolved into gas and fine dust. Joy flexed her knees, placing her bare feet against the porch deck, her arms stretched taut above her head, and she kicked, hard, launching herself into space.
I followed, a bit less gracefully.
My trajectory was directly astern of Joy, sailing through 20 meters of open air, following her feet in toward the water. She hit with a splash, sharp and clean, and a couple of seconds later I hit the water as well, plunging deep into the luminous emerald depths.
The water was 3 degrees above body temperature. There was no need to breathe. The Freitas respirocytes in our systems would keep us oxygenated for a good ten minutes or so. As I moved inward, the water slowing my velocity, Joy turned, opening her arms and legs to receive me. I collided with her gently, the impact putting us into a slow and gentle tumble. We pulled in close to each other, her mouth seeking mine. . . .
Eventually, we had to breathe, so we disentangled and made our way to the nearest surface. How you saw the surroundings depended on how you told your mind to see them. For a dizzying moment, it felt as though I’d just poked my head out of the bottom of the hydrosphere, with the surface of the Free Fall’s interior sweeping past directly below.
My stomach gave a small lurch, and I made myself think I was looking up instead. The floor of the Free Fall restaurant now passed serenely overhead, the clusters of tables like stars arranged in tight little constellations. Joy surfaced beside me, holding me.
In microgravity, we didn’t have to work at staying afloat. In fact, with a little effort, we could have paddled our way out of the water entirely and hung there in midair, just “above” the water’s surface. I’m not at all shy, but I preferred to stay in the water, engulfed by the warmth. After I’d taken a breath, Joy pulled at my legs, drawing me back into the emerald glow.
The hydrosphere was thinly occupied at the moment. There were three other couples embracing within the depths, barely visible in the water, and a couple of teenagers who appeared to be racing each other back and forth across the sphere.
“I wanted to thank you, Doc.” Her words both appeared on my in-head display and sounded within my ears as she subvocalized them and sent them through her own cerebral data feed, which transmitted them to me. The system is as good as telepathy; we could talk and be understood even though we were underwater.
“For what?” I asked, playing dumb. Her eyes, centimeters from mine in the clear water, were hypnotic. Her hands were on my back, her legs wrapped around mine. Somehow, I wanted that moment to last forever, and I was afraid that if I just said, “You’re welcome,” she would let go.
“For saving my life. For fighting off the bad guys. For not leaving me there when the order came down for you to bug out. Lots of reasons.”
“Well we don’t leave our own behind,” I told her. “And the rest was just . . . just doing my job, y’know?”
“Doing your job,” she told me with a hard edge to her voice, “would have meant pulling a CAPTR on me. Turning me into a fucking zombie!”
“Yeah . . . well, that’s kind of a last resort, if there’s no other way.” I desperately wanted to change the subject. I kept seeing Kilgore in her eyes . . . and then his face was replaced by Paula’s. I ran my hand up the bare curve of her spine. “Hey, this really does feel good as new. They did a good job!”
“Not even any scars.”
Playfully, I let my hand move lower, well below the level where her spine had snapped. “You feel this?”
“Perfectly,” she said, laughing.
“I just want to make sure they grew your spinal cord back properly.”
She giggled in my mind. “It’s nice to have a professional opinion.”
Her left hand was still at the small of my back, pressing me close. Her right had moved, was moving up my thigh. I could feel myself becoming aroused, a tingling warmth, but there was a thin, reedy flutter of panic there as well. I almost pulled away. . . .
It wasn’t that I was being faithful to Paula, or any such romantic nonsense as that. I’d certainly thought about finding a fuck buddy, even just for a night—Carla Harper, for instance, if I could ever pry her away from Doob for an evening. I’d been tempted more than once by Kari Harris—smart, quick, and pretty, though the word was that she was in an exclusive relationship with a woman working in Supply. There was that waitress at the Earthview . . . what was her name? Masha, yeah. Even if she had expected a cred-exchange for the privilege. The
point was, it had been a year since I’d lost Paula. Time to get over it and move on, right?
So why couldn’t I? . . .
Joy’s hand moved higher.
“You, ah, don’t have to do this,” I said. God, I felt clumsy!
“It’s not about have,” she said. “Maybe I want to. Maybe I just want you. Does this feel good?”
Yeah, it did. So far, though, my arousal was purely internal. Impulsively, I went to one of my in-head menus and switched off my CC-PDE5 inhibitors.
Oh, yeah. It started feeling real good. . . .
PDE5—phosphodiesterase type 5—is a naturally occurring enzyme in the human body, where it’s found especially in the retina of the eye and within the corpus cavernosum, the smooth muscle responsible for penile erection. By constantly breaking down the nucleotides responsible for relaxing smooth-muscle tissue and controlling certain specific blood vessels, it makes it possible for men to wear skinsuits or layers of nanoclothing without accidentally and constantly proving to the world how manly they are.
With shipboard skinsuits as revealingly formfitting as they are, male military personnel routinely have nanobotic CC-PDE5 inhibitors circulating within their corpus cavernosa, allowing fashion statements that have long been common in the civilian world as well. There are, of course, civilians who do want to make those manly statements, but on board ship such statements can too easily get in the way or get caught on something.
Centuries ago, they used chemical PDE5 inhibitors like sildenafil to treat erectile dysfunction. Nowadays, it’s easier and surer to use nanobots to suppress the local effects of PDE5 while selectively enhancing the effects of those vasodilatory nucleotides at will. Whenever the man decides to hell with fashion, that he wants extra blood flowing to certain parts of his anatomy . . .
Which was precisely where I found myself at that moment. The actual biochemistry takes only a few seconds to complete. Within moments, I was ready for her.
And, oh, yes, Joy was ready for me.
Like nudity, sex in public wasn’t the social taboo it once was. Most parties and cocktail gatherings nowadays involved orgies, at least in a back room, and it wasn’t unusual to see couples making love on the beach or in a public park. Why should there be taboos over something so completely natural, so essentially human?
Human or not, it’s interesting to see how modern technology has crept into this most basic of human pastimes. I found myself thinking again of Private Howell. And there were men, I knew, who used nanotechnology to put that manliness I mentioned on deliberate display, either to advertise for a willing partner or just to show off. There was one group, the “Pole Vaulters,” who went around sporting public erections all the time.
Quite apart from what the military had to say about such demonstrations, that sort of thing wasn’t for me. Like I said, I wasn’t shy, but I found I was a bit reluctant about showing off my passion to the whole restaurant as it circled around the two of us. Under the water, though, the two of us were simply shadows entwined with each other. We could see those three other couples in the distance—no, one of them was a ménage à trois, it looked like, not a couple—but in any case they weren’t paying any attention to us, any more than we were watching them.
For a long time, all I could look at were the depths of Joy’s eyes. Once in a while we would surface for air, then drift again deeper into the glowing depths.
Gods! Was Private Howell’s o-looping better than this?
I lost all track of time, lost all track of others in the water with us, lost all track of everything except her.
Later, she joined us at the table for dinner and then drinks. “Hey, No-Joy,” Doob said as she took a seat. “Thanks for joining us!”
I read his grin, and the laughter in his eyes. “You son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “You invited her, didn’t you?”
“You have a problem with that?”
“Hell, no! I just feel ambushed, is all.”
We’d picked up skinsuit patches at the Free Fall’s pole after we used the axis handholds to pull ourselves out of the water. You transferred a few e-creds through a palm contact and picked up a fist-sized ball of goo that spread out over your body when you slapped it against your chest. I used my in-head to program mine in the same conservative two-tone pattern I’d been wearing before, black and maroon, with a gold filigree design over my left shoulder and down my arm. Joy programmed hers differently, though—nothing but bare skin on the right side of her body, but with rainbows of liquid light swirling up from left ankle to the top of her head. Damn, she was beautiful!
“That’s the Marines for ya,” Harris said, laughing. “You never know when they’re going to strike!”
“They’re always alert for targets of opportunity,” Klinginsmith added.
“Fuck that,” Joy said, growing another seat out of the deck and sitting down. “This ambush was deliberate, well planned, and with malice aforethought. Hey, that looks good.”
In our absence, the others had gone ahead and ordered their meals. Carla Harper had ordered the silversweet, a genengineered delicacy, part meat, part fruit, grown here in orbit, and Joy decided she would have some as well. I stuck with the unicorn, and called up another trajectory.
“So Doobie tells me you’ve been accepted for FMF,” Joy told me.
“That’s right. Don’t tell anyone I dragged your ass out of a firefight under false pretenses, okay?”
“Don’t worry, Doc. You can drag my ass any day!”
I laughed. I was curious about my own feelings at that point, and probed at them a bit, half expecting to get pain reflecting back. There was a twinge . . . but maybe I was finally accepting that I’d done the best I could for Paula, that sometimes there was nothing you could do, that your best simply wasn’t good enough. I’d done my best for Joy and for Dave Kilgore. Both of them were alive, and that counted as a success in anyone’s book. One of them was a zombie—like Paula—and nothing I could have done in the sailboat’s well deck or beside the Qesh pit on the Bloodworld could have made a difference there.
So far as the two of them were concerned, each was the same person as before the CAPTR, whatever the hell that actually meant.
And I was now HM2 Elliot Carlyle (FMF), and officially a part of the team. It felt damned good.
“Here,” Doob said, extending his hand. I took it, and felt the flow of incoming data, palm to palm. “You kids enjoy this.”
“Kids?” I said. “You’re younger than I am, youngster.” He was, too, by six months.
Then I opened his electronic package. It was two nights’ stay for two at the Rabu Hoteru, a high-end Japanese Geosynch orbital hotel complex catering to newlyweds and sex tourists. It was Friday night, shipboard time, and weekend liberty didn’t expire until 0800 Monday morning. Joy and I had until then to . . . get better acquainted.
Most hotels in zero-gravity catered to people who wanted to try out sex in microgravity, but the Japanese had pioneered the field a couple of centuries ago, and the Rabu Hoteru was supposed to be something special. Among other things they offered was a shared sensual net that let you feel what your partner was feeling in addition to your own sensations, and you could edit them on the fly, as it were.
Man, Private Howell never knew what he was missing.
I was dead tired on Monday morning when I checked in. For some reason, Joy and I hadn’t caught all that much sleep by the time we caught a fling pod for the Wheel, then made our transfer back to Starport and the Clymer. We’d kind of been out of the loop so far as both official news and scuttlebutt were concerned, so we hadn’t heard.
The Commonwealth was organizing an invasion fleet to take Gliese 581 back from the Qesh.
Ships were marshalling for the deployment there at Starport, though most were in free orbit nearby, rather than docked, as the troop ships were. The battleships Lütgens, Montcalm, Garibaldi, Sinaloa, and Penn
sylvania; the star carriers Constitution, Spirit of Earth, Magna Carta, and Droits de l’Homme; the heavy cruisers Suffren, Jianghu, Godavari, Almirante Villavicencio, Antietam, and Yorktown; the heavy bombardment vessels Turner and Slava . . . the list ran on and on, with almost two hundred ships already in Geosynch orbit, and more arriving all the time.
We’d pinpointed only forty-four Qesh ships in the Gliese system, not counting the Rocs, which appeared to be for planetary surface combat rather than fleet actions. In terms of mass, however, and possibly of technology, we would be heavily outnumbered. The biggest ships we could muster were the system monitors Sentinel and Europa, and the Jotun-class monster that was probably the predarion flagship was five times more massive than either of them.
The scuttlebutt was that Admiral Talbot’s orders were to attempt to contact the Qesh without initiating a fight, to overawe them, perhaps, with a show of force that would convince them to go find easier pickings elsewhere.
From what we’d seen of the Qesh battlefleet, I wasn’t sure that overawe would be the operative word. The Commonwealth was using predator psychology against the Qesh, but no one knew whether they would be thinking like the predators we knew from our limited and strictly parochial experiences on Earth.
Terrestrial predators, you see, won’t attack a target if there’s a good chance that they’re going to be injured in the process, not unless they’re damned hungry and have no other options. A pack of wolves might bring down a healthy adult reindeer, but if one of them is injured in the process it will die. Better to stay at the fringe of the herd, watching for an easy target, one that is itself injured, sick, or young, and separated from the others.
Talbot, according to what we were seeing on the Monday newsfeeds, was counting on the presumed unwillingness of the Qesh to risk losing a significant portion of their fleet. Since the fall of the R’agch’lgh Collective, they’d been limited in being able to acquire new ships, or new crews to operate them. Forty-four Qesh ships might well obliterate the largest fleet we could send against them, but at what cost? The Commonwealth Planetary Security Bureau was hoping they would back off, and go raid prey that couldn’t bite back.
