by Ian Douglas
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 probably 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 w
asn’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!”
“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.
I
n 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!”
