Battlespace (6 page)

The upshot of it was that the political situation—always something of concern for the Corps—was becoming damned hard to understand.

“We can offer inducements for volunteers,” Kinsey suggested. “Surely that is preferable to simply ordering them to turn around and keep marching off into the future.”

“Perhaps,” Shugart said. “The Federal Advisory Council will leave those decisions to the Marine brass and to the American Congress. But Mr. Ramsey and his people
are
going to Sirius. One way or another.”

Ramsey wondered if the phrase
United States of America
even had meaning any longer. Just who was the Corps supposed to be fighting for now?

5
NOVEMBER
2159

Starstruck
Condecology Tower Raphael
Level 486
East Los Angeles, California
2028 hours, PST

The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf of the tower, almost five hundred stories above the brilliantly lit sprawl of Greater Los Angeles. Garroway, Anna Garcia, Roger Eagleton, Regi Lobowski, Tim Womicki, and Kat Vinton stepped onto the platform, resplendent in newly issued Class A dress uniforms. A stiff wind off the ocean chilled and Garroway pulled his formal cloak a little closer about him. Eagleton paid off the transport with a wave of his newly issued asset card.

“You sure we belong here, Gare?” Kat asked him.

“I gave the flier's AI the address,” Garroway told her. “This must be it.”

“It” was a graceful series of curving walls and partial domes built into the side of one of Greater LA's newer sky-towers. The landing platform was broad and edged with walled gardens and gene-tailored landscaping. Several other skytowers gleamed in the night in the near-distance, self-contained arcologies, some 5 kilometers high and each hold
ing a small city in its own right. The one named Raphael, an implant download told Garroway with a whispering in his mind, had been completed ten years ago and packed 950 stories into a column 3.8 kilometers tall. It housed 15,000 people in spacious luxury, as well as hundreds of shops, stores, restaurants, theme malls, indoor parks and plazas, recnexi, and tobbos…whatever
those
were. People could live out their entire lives in Raphael or one of the other condecologies and never set foot outside.

To Garroway, that seemed a sterile kind of life, hardly worthy of the name. Still, different people, different customs….

“Hey, even if it's the wrong address, it's worth it just getting offbase for a bit,” Anna Garcia said. “I didn't think they were going to let us go.”

“I sure don't know what the hassle is, that's for damned sure,” Womicki said. “With all the form screens we had to thumb, you'd've thought we were trying to smuggle in ancient high-tech artifacts or something.”

“Whoa,” Eagleton said, nudging Garroway in the ribs. “Look at this!”

A woman walked out to meet them in a swirl of luminescence. She was strikingly nude; nanoimplants within her skin glowed in constantly shifting colors visible through the translucence of her skin, pulsing between deep ultramarine blue and emerald green. Her delicate tuft of neatly coiffed pubic hair had been treated as well; it glowed brightly, cycling from bright yellow to orange to red to gold to yellow again, creating interesting contrasts of hue against the deeper, inner glow of her thighs and belly. Her face and hair, however, were masked behind a silver, visorless helm. A spray of optical threads created a dazzling cascade of moving green and amber light rising over her head and spilling down each side to the ground.

“You didn't tell us we had to
dress
for dinner, Gare,” Anna whispered at his side.

“Johnny!” the woman cried. “So glad you downjacked!”

“Uh…Tegan?”

“Who else?”

He gave an awkward grin. “Sorry. I didn't recognize you…uh…dressed like that. I appreciate your asking us out here tonight.”

“Hey, no skaff.” The cold didn't appear to bother her. “The mere the meller, reet? These your hangers?”

He blinked. Her speech was quite rapid and laced with unfamiliar words. “I guess so. Uh…these are my friends, the ones I told you about. This is Corporal Kat Vinton, Corporal—”

“Vix the IDs,” Tegan said, waving a glowing hand. “Leave it for the noumens.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don't expect me to downrem
names
, do you?” She laughed. “Grampie, you
are
synched out! C'mon!”

“Does ‘grampie' mean what I think it does?” Anna asked.

“‘Grandparent'?” Eagleton replied
sotto voce
. “‘Grandpa'? That's my guess.”

“Are you understanding any of this, Gare?” Kat asked him in a whisper as they followed the woman toward the building entrance.

“Oh, a word here and there,” Garroway admitted.

“‘Johnny'?” Eagleton said and snickered.

“That was my civvie name,” he said. “John Garroway Esteban. But I dropped the Esteban on my naming day, and I lost the John in boot camp.”

He wondered just how much in common he had with Tegan now. He'd given her a netcall as soon as they'd been informed that the com interdict had been lifted, and she'd sounded happy to hear from him. She'd invited him and anyone he cared to bring along to a
numnum
…whatever the hell that was. They'd approached Staff Sergeant Dunne and, after a few frustrating hours of red tape and a
lot
of question
ing, received passes. Garroway had the impression that there were some high-level complications in the request, but he didn't care about the details. Just so long as they could get out of Twentynine Palms for a few precious hours.

“So who is this Tegan?” Anna wanted to know.

He shrugged. “A friend. I met her down in Hermisillo a few years ago. A few years before I joined the Marines, I mean. She was on winter vacation at a resort down there.”

“Just a friend?” Womicki asked.

“Well, no. More than that.” That had been before he'd started seeing Lynnley.

“I got news for you. She's too old for you now, son,” Lobowski said. “‘Out of synch,' huh?”

“Oh, she looks pretty well-preserved,” Eagleton said, eyeing her glowing back as she led the way through a high, curved archway and into the party proper.

“Yeah,” Womicki said. “Almost as well-preserved as us.”

Garroway shook his head. The objective-subjective time difference was taking some getting used to. Cybehibe did not entirely stop aging, but it did drastically slow all bodily processes by a factor of something like five to one. That, coupled with the effects of time dilation, meant that Garroway and his fellow Marines had aged less than a year biologically, while Tegan had aged twenty.

Of course, anagathic treatments were becoming more common and less expensive on Earth. At the base, Garroway had already met people who were over a hundred years old, but who looked no older than fifty. Someday, perhaps, thanks to nanomedical prophylaxis, age might not matter at all.

But in the meantime, it could be disconcerting. Tegan had been a year younger than he when he'd left Earth.

Inside the doorway, the floor dropped away in a large, roughly circular room sunken in the middle, with alcoves and balconies at various levels on all sides. A warm, indirect ruby-hued lighting made walls and ceilings hard to discern, a
dreamscape of subtle, sensuously curving forms. Everything appeared to be made of moving red light, and it was tough to see what was solid wall or floor and what was not.

And the place was packed.

The six Marines stopped and stared, their mouths comically open. There must have been hundreds of people present, standing, sitting, or lying a-sprawl on the thickly scattered divans that appeared to have grown out of the floor. Many, men and women both, were nude or nearly so, though most wore bangles and elaborate high-tech helmets that completely masked their faces, and their skin glowed with myriad inner hues. Those not stripped down were wildly dressed up. Garroway wondered if there was a competition under way for the most elaborate and eye-popping costume.

“Is this your home?” Kat asked the woman.

“What? Are you seerse? This is a sensethete, of course! It's called the Starstruck, and it's part of the conde. Part of the service, y'know?”

“Take your cloaks?” a gleaming, streamlined machine floating above the floor asked. Garroway and the others removed their cloaks, draping them across the robot's waiting and multiple arms. “And your clothing, ladies and sirs?”

“I beg your pardon?” Womicki asked.

“When in Rome, Mick,” Garroway said, gesturing at the crowd.

“I think I'll keep my uniform on, thank you,” Kat said.

Garroway agreed. “We're fine,” he told the hovering robot. It hummed in what seemed a disapproving manner, but then floated off into the encircling red mist. Casual and social nudity had long been accepted throughout most of the southern and western states, and there was little privacy for males or females in a Marine squad bay or on board ship. Privacy wasn't an issue.

However, this was different. The other guests weren't completely bare, but were adorned in myriad ways, with
nanoinduced internal lighting, with devices that appeared to be grown into the skin itself and with various items of jewelry. There was, Garroway thought wryly, a large difference between
nude
and
naked
. The six Marines would have looked somewhat akin to plucked chickens in this gaudy company, and at least their blue with red and white trim Class A's gave them some ornamentation.

“You'll need these, grampies,” Tegan said, returning to them. She held out a pair of delicately shaped and filigreed helmets. A helmed, winged angel with fluorescent violet tattoos and a handsome man wearing a low-cut seventeenth-century ball gown handed them four more.

“What are these for?” Lobowski wanted to know, turning one uncertainly in his hands.

“You don't viz techelms?” the angel asked. He laughed.

“G'wan!” the guy in the ball gown told them. “Put 'em on and down 'em! You'll jack!”

Hesitantly, Garroway slipped the helmet he'd been given onto his head. The visor was opaque, blocking all vision. He felt a warm tingle at the back of his skull and at the temples.

And then…

Color and light exploded around him, and he heard a murmuring ripple of multiple conversations in his head. He could see now, despite the opaque visor. Somehow, the helmet was taking in his surroundings and transmitting them directly to his implant. He could see more clearly, more crisply than before, and was aware of a tumbling avalanche of detail.

It was, in fact, a little like being linked into a tactical net in combat, except that this was accompanied by an odd, very deep, and very sensuous inner movement of feeling and emotion. It took him a moment to identify it:
pleasure
.

“
How's that feel
?” Tegan asked him, her voice sliding into his mind like liquid silk. “
Nice
?”

“It's…interesting.”

And it was going to take some getting used to. It wasn't
that he minded the sensation of pleasure itself. It was the fact that these pleasurable sensations were coming and going, emerging, building, exploding all without any thought, movement, or input from him.

In fact, the sensation was like what he'd always imagined a nano-induced high might be like, one that involved all of his senses. As he looked about, he realized that the bodies of the people around him were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—enhanced. The men seemed more handsome, more muscular, more athletic, while the women were slimmer, more beautiful of face, more generous and perky of bosom. The man in the ball gown was now a lovely woman, and the gown itself an explosion of blue and silver starlight. Many of the guests were no longer even human; a radiantly green and golden lion with eagle's wings stared at them from a nearby dais. Other shapes were more outlandish—zoomorphic, angelic, demonic, or mixtures of the three. Were they real? Or illusion? Or some subtle combination of the two? Some shapes morphed and shifted from one thing to another as he watched.

And he could hear things, conversations he'd not been able to hear before, and it was impossible to tell whether he was hearing actual sound or picking up on a mingling interchange of surface thoughts.

“
Oh sure, and the flam did the jug out of a whiter, reet
?…”

“
And so she was neg way, and then I was yeah, way, and then she was neg way, and then
…”

“
So'dja hear the zit on Chollin and Vashti?
…”

“
Well, Ran and Silva and me, we all vammed down to Cancun for a bit of a vaccshi, and
…”

“
So I was getting bored, totally weed, and there was this new religion, Galaninism, and I thought, reet, why not, it can't be as moomy as the Church of the Mindful Stars
…”

“
So why'd Teeg invite them? Fascists
….”

That last had cut through the other conversations with a peculiar bitterness. He tried to focus on it, and picked up a few more words.

“Ah,
you know how the Army is, always narbing in and invading places where it's not wanted
….”

“Hey, did you hear that?” Eagleton said aloud, looking about.

“Ignore it, Rog,” Garroway told him. “We're guests here, remember?”

“Besides,” Kat added judiciously, “they're obviously talking about someone else. We're not Army.”

Garroway took a cautious couple of steps, feeling for the deck beneath his feet. It was, he thought, like stepping into a dream, one where nothing was quite as it seemed.

“
Here
,” someone said in his mind. “
Groz this, grampie
.”

A silver and black metallic sphere was placed in his hand. As he looked at it, trying to get an idea of both what it was for and what its true form might be, it twisted itself in his palm, opening itself. A thick lavender mist spilled out and he caught the tang of cinnamon. And…something else. As he inhaled, he felt the rush exploding out of his lungs and throat and tingling all the way down to his toes and back up his spine to the crown of his head. The helmet took the sensation, amplified it, twisted it…and fed it back to him in rippling pulses of feeling.

“Is this stuff
legal
?” he heard Lobowski say.