by Ian Douglas
“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 z
ero-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 Pennsylvania; 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.
That was the idea, anyway. Like so much else in military operations, things didn’t develop according to plan. The Qesh were warriors, and they had a certain disdain for scavengers, as we later learned.
The Qesh did not normally back away from a fight.
The Grand Commonwealth Fleet broke orbit a few days later, accelerating out-system on their Plottel Drives until local space was flat enough that they could wrap space around themselves and begin chewing through the light years at something like three and a third per day. A week later, we dropped back into normal space a bit over three astronomical units out from the Bloodstar. Unlike the last time, we didn’t play it sneaky, and made no effort to hide our arrival. We decelerated into Gliese 581’s inner system on our Plottel space drives, broadcasting our intent to talk if we could, to fight if we must.
We’d heard one Qesh, at least, speaking English during our sneak-and-peek. We knew they must understand us.
But there was no reply from the titanic warships clustered around Gliese 581 IV. They were ignoring us—or waiting for us, and it was hard to tell which was more unsettling.
Throughout the transit to Gliese 581 and during most of the final approach, I occupied myself with the usual round of duty and watch standing. There’s no such thing as day or night on board a starship, so although we operate on Starport time, which is Greenwich plus five, roughly half of the ship’s crew and passengers were up and about at any given time. The company Corpsmen stood one in four watches to cover the night shift, their duty primarily that of holding sick call for Marines or naval personnel who hurt themselves or who’d come down with the creeping awfuls.
So things were pretty slow the night Sergeant Leighton came down to sick bay. She was off duty, and I was making up nanosurgical packs and stowing them for the upcoming op, a mindless task handled by the sick bay’s robots that didn’t require much in the way of human attention. “Hey, Doc.”
“Hey, beautiful. What brings you down here?” She didn’t look ill.
“I heard you had the duty, thought I’d stop by.”
She was wearing standard Marine utilities—olive drab skintights, but considerably less revealing than what she’d worn at the Free Fall . . . and not worn at the hotel later. I thought longingly about the tube-racks in the sick bay’s small hospital section, and there was one in the duty room, too, but using one would have been very much contra-regs while on duty. You never knew when the OOD—the officer of the deck—might wander through, and besides, the AI running the sick bay would make a record of everything done or said.
“I’m glad you did,” I told her. “I’ve missed you.”
“Yeah, well . . . it’s been crazy, y’know? Heavy on the training sims.”
The Corpsmen had been going through simulated training sessions as well. As a Marine Recon battalion, the only unit with actual surface time on the Bloodworld, the Black Wizards would be serving as guides for the rest of the Marine invasion force. Bravo Company, once again, would be hitting the city of Salvation, only this time we would be coming down smack in the middle of the ruined spaceport.
“You worried about the landing?” I asked. Hell, I knew I was, and I hadn’t been shot up the way she’d been.
“Nah,” she said. “It’s all pretty soppy.”
Soppy—military slang for standard operating procedure. A planetary invasion was never that, but it was something for which the Marines constantly trained.
But I could tell Joy was anxious about something.
“So what’s nagging you?”
“I’m worried about the Salvationists,” she said. “The Bloodworld colonists. Have you seen the latest briefing download?”
I nodded. “I pulled them off their computer net, remember? And I looked through some of the stuff on the way back.”
“By living on Bloodworld, they think they’re suffering for the sins of the whole Earth. All of Humankind.”
“Not my sins,” I said. “I never signed up for that.”
“Neither did I.”
“It doesn’t make any sense!” I shrugged. “There’s one religion that’s been around since the eighteen hundreds. Among other things, they made a practice out of baptizing people after they’re dead.”
She made a face. “What, they dunked dead bodies?”
I laughed. “No. But they would look up the names of ancestors, and then baptize them by proxy. They thought that baptism was absolutely necessary if someone was going to get into heaven.”
“So the people getting baptized didn’t have a choice.”
“Right . . . though I suppose the people in that sect thought they were doing them a favor. I think some religions are just a little too anxious to help other people, though, and don’t pay attention to their own problems first.”
“I still don
’t see why the Salvationists would choose to live in a place like Bloodworld.”
“Religious history is full of examples of people who became hermits living out in the desert, who gave up sex, who used knotted cords to whip themselves bloody, who gave up everything they owned, who castrated themselves, who massacred whole populations, who gave up technology, who blew up buildings full of people, who had themselves crucified, who joined in mass suicides. All in the name of Jesus, or to please God or to get into heaven or to . . . I don’t know. Get other people to stop sinning and join them, I guess.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s religion. People who really, really believe can be pretty scary. I’m not saying belief is wrong . . . but you need some real-world common sense, too.”
“You’re Reformed Gardie, like me, aren’t you?”
“My parents were. I’m not sure what I believe.” I thought about it. “I guess what’s important for me is the idea of respecting others. Doesn’t matter how crazy they are, or exactly what they believe. They’ve got the gods-given right to believe what the hell they want. Just so they return the favor.”
She nodded. “The Gardnerian’s Rule. ‘Whatever you send out comes back to you three-fold.’ ”
“So how do you handle that, Marine?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t care to be the plasma gunner in a squad and have three times my firepower coming back at me! Is that what happened to you on Bloodworld?”
She shrugged. “Things can’t always be taken literally.”
“Right.”
“I know that’s rationalizing. . . .”
“Doesn’t matter. Humans are great at taking strange beliefs and rationalizing them, twisting them around until they can live with them. Look at the Salvationists.”
“You think their living on Bloodworld is a rationalization?”
“I think believing that they’re living there to save us is. I think they didn’t know just how bad the place was—or maybe they went there thinking God would provide a miracle, tame the winds, calm the seismic quakes, plug up the volcanoes, make the air breathable. When that didn’t happen, they had to explain to themselves why things were so bad.”
