Authors: Mark Kalina
The interior of the elevator tower was almost alien to Zandy. The broad, mall-like corridors were filled with stores and displays. Holographic advertisements flashed out in front of groups of people who thronged the wide walk-ways. The holographs pulsed with bright colors and eye catching motions, giving sometimes surreal sales pitches for refreshments, clothes, electronics and other goods and services that Zandy could only guess at. She had seen something a little like this when her school class had taken a trip to Neomiletus City Center, but this was far more intense. Zandy felt almost overwhelmed by the time she reached the passenger lounge on the 300th floor.
The ride
up
came soon enough. She waited for a hour at the 300th floor passenger lounge, using some of the hoarded money her parents had given her to buy a stimulant drink. She had never had one before.
The lounge was... elegant, Zandy thought. It was all silvery metal and subdued colored glass, shaped in asymmetric curved panels and decorated here and there with inlays of smooth glossy wood. Vast, tinted bubble windows around the perimeter of the lounge showed the other towers and the streams of sleek aircars, gleaming and glinting as they flew past in the low afternoon sun.
This was it! This was the fate she had wanted. Nothing mass-pre-fabricated here, or at least nothing that
looked
like it. No less than the surroundings, the people at the lounge were amazing to Zandy. They were dressed in the latest fashions, sleek and smooth like the surroundings. They talked or sat silently, plugged into direct interface data feeds.
Some were probably
aristokratai
, Zandy thought, but it was hard to pick them out, unless most of the young, fit looking people here were
aristokratai
. She didn't
think
so, but there was almost no way to tell for most of them. Some people, old looking, or out of shape, were obviously
demoi
, but even those, commoners like her, were such a far cry from the residence zones, dressed in sharp-looking clothing, using direct interface implants. It occurred to Zandy that she would be getting an implant; brain surgery! That was scary, and the stim-drink was amping up the fear. She forced the worry down again.
And a few of the people here were
definitely
, unmistakably,
aristokratai
. She could see two slim figures in Fleet black uniforms, with gold rank and merit decorations. Those were certainly daemons, she knew; human minds held in artificial neural nets, living in artificial, perfect bodies. They didn't
look
that odd; they looked handsome, confident, but they
looked
human. They certainly didn't look dead, or robotic. That was a comforting thought.
And then the passenger capsule was there, arriving from the maintenance hangar below with a vast electric hum. The wide silver doors slid open, and the lounge emptied as people boarded. The passenger capsule was larger than a mag-lev train car, but vertical, with decks stacked up, one over the other, with a bank of substantial elevators inside to let the passengers move between decks. There were seating decks, with wide crystal clear view ports, and also compartments to rest or sleep, and even a restaurant deck.
Zandy found a seat next to one of the view ports. A small display in her seat's armrest came to life, running a short safety vid, showing diagrams of locations of emergency escape-and-reentry pods, and going over what to do in the event of a loss of cabin pressure. The capsule started its ascent while she watched the safety vid, lifting with a smooth, soaring acceleration and a deep hum that resonated through her seat.
It was a long ride. The passenger capsule took more than five hours to climb the more than 35,000 kilometers to the station. At first the feeling of speed was amazing; the capsule shot away from the tower, speeding up rapidly till it was running up the orbital elevator track at more than five hundred kilometers an hour. The view was unbelievable. Imitating some other passengers, Zandy got up from her seat and walked around the seating deck, looking through the large view ports to all sides. She could see all of the Surface Port city, spread out below her and stretching out away from the elevator in all directions. She could see Neomiletus from here. The smaller city's outer reaches mingled with the edge of the urban zone of the New Ionia Surface Port. She could even see, distantly, the pattern of residence zones around Neomiletus, but she was not sure which had been hers.
The feeling of ascent reminded her of elevators she had been in, when she had visited the City Center of Neomiletus; it felt as if she were being pressed into the floor; the capsule was accelerating. Eventually, she got back to her seat. The vid screen in her seat's arm-rest offered an option to look down, through video cameras mounted at the bottom of the capsule, and Zandy selected the view. Far below was the orbital elevator tower, and around it the foreshortened buildings of the Surface Port. The vast towers looked tiny from the growing altitude.
The sky darkened as the capsule soared up. The elevator capsule reached a thousand kilometers per hour in the thin upper atmosphere. Once the atmosphere was below them, in space, they really sped up; the vid screen display showed that the maximum speed was almost nine thousand kilometers per hour, two point five KPS, before the capsule started slowing down, approaching the Geosynchronous Station.
Up until the turn-over point, Zandy had not been in free-fall. At first, New Ionia's gravity, and then the acceleration of the capsule, had kept the floor feeling like it was "down." But when, 33,000 kilometers above New Ionia, with the whole planet looking like a blue and white ball far below, the pod had started decelerating, the floor was suddenly "up" and Zandy was suddenly "upside down." It was Zandy's first experience with variable gee. And then her first experience with free-fall, as the capsule arrived at the enormous Geosynchronous Station.
For a girl from the residence zones, who had never before been out of her home city, it was a whirlwind. The New Ionia Geosynchronous Station was an enormous cylinder, more than a kilometer across, three kilometers tall. The elevator passed through it, heading deeper into space, to the High Orbit Tether Station, another 20,000 kilometers up. But New Ionia Geosynchronous Station was where a dazed Zandy got off.
Perhaps, Zandy thought, the Academy staff were used to collecting people like her. At any rate, they did not make her wait for long, picking her up in the passenger lounge at the disembarkation point. By the time they had gotten to her, Zandy had learned to crawl along in free-fall, hand over hand down the color-coded grab-rails that crisscrossed the lounge and the vast central spaces of the station. She had also learned that her idea of somehow spending some time sightseeing would be harder than she expected. Everything, down to a bulb of drinking water, was so expensive that the carefully hoarded money she had brought wouldn't have lasted a single day.
Even so, in the hour she waited at the lounge Zandy saw things that amazed her. Her brother had been right about Modifieds; among the people floating by there were a few that were obviously Modified. Some had fur, or scales or tufts of iridescent feathers! Some had sky-blue skin or crimson red skin, or hair, or eyes. Some had tiger-stripes or other patterns. Some, the most disturbing and intriguing, had faces that blended human and inhuman: feline or reptilian features, or features like some sort of pixies or elves from a fantasy vid. Most of the normal looking people barely bothered to look at them.
The clothing all these people wore, Modified, normal and
aristokratai
, was also like nothing Zandy had ever seen. Some were nearly nude, and what clothing they did have didn't cover the parts she would have expected; there was a Modified woman with colorful sleeves and leggings, with her face hidden behind a data visor and her leopard patterned chest left bare! Others wore clothes with wing-like fans attached to the arms and legs. Many wore clothes with the logos of different corporations or guilds. The styles and cuts and colors and materials were a parade of things Zandy had never seen before. And this, thought Zandy, was just a passenger lounge.
From the moment the handsome young-looking man in Fleet black had collected her, Zandy's voyage became even more of a blur. He checked her identity, indulgently letting her show her ID chit before telling her that he had already pinged the ID chit and confirmed who she was by data feed as soon as he saw her. There was one other person here from the Academy, and another fourteen cadets to be collected, and for a few minutes, as he scanned the crowd for the other cadets, the man had spoken to her, talking in a friendly way about the ride up the elevator, asking if it had been her first time, and smiling with amusement at the double-entendre.
Then the fifteen cadets were all together and the two Academy proctors were guiding them into an intra-station tram, heading for an orbital transfer flight to the Academy Station. The other cadets were mostly silent, young like Zandy, looking out the windows of the tram at the zero-gee metropolis of the station. There were holographic signs and marquees everywhere, advertising everything Zandy could imagine, and lots of things she couldn't figure out. The tram ran down the center of a vast circular tunnel full of people, shops, signs and lights. People floated across the space, or moved along motorized, color-coded hand rails, or flitted about in little one and two person transports that looked a little like flying scooters. Even more than in the passenger lounge, Zandy could see the overwhelming diversity of the people who lived or worked here, or were just passing through. Again she wondered which of the thousands of people she saw were human, and which were biosims. If she could have, Zandy would have people watched for hours. The tram was pulling up to the docking ring for orbital transfer shuttles before it occurred to Zandy that the Academy proctor she had chatted with must have been
aristokratai
.
It was all too strange for words, to Zandy. The shuttle, with its odd, slightly stale plastic-and-something-else smell, and its cramped seats with multiple restraints, was almost anti-climactic. The flight was a series of rumbling sounds and firm pushes into the seat, with long periods of weightlessness and silence except for the sounds of the air vents and the slowly growing conversation of the cadets.
Her first flight on a spaceship, Zandy thought. It was really happening; not just the flight, but the whole thing. Somehow she had gone through with it. She was off of New Ionia, in space, headed for the Fleet Academy and a future she could not really imagine, save that it would be nothing at all like the life she had led to this point.
The cadets spoke to each other, telling about themselves. All were
demoi
, born to
demoi
families. Only three, counting herself, were from the residence zones, but Zandy didn't get the sense of any real hostility from the wealthier cadets. Only one boy had been in space before, on a business trip with his mother, up the elevator.
There was a fair bit of bravado, Zandy thought. No one spoke of doubts now. No one admitted to fear. No one mentioned daemons either, though the two Academy proctors, who had to be daemons themselves, were sitting in the compartment with them.
Somehow, the actual Academy made less of an impression in Zandy's memory than that first impossible day when she left New Ionia did. The Academy Station orbited one of New Ionia's three small moons, a cylindrical space station which was only about a quarter the size of the vast New Ionia Geosynchronous Station, but which was, Zandy discovered, still really big.
From the very start there had been so much to see, but next to no time to see it. Fleet ships docked at the Academy Station; there were sleek swift-ships and one enormous lance-ship, half a kilometer long, tethered to the docking arms that projected, needle-like, from the axis of the station. Zandy would have gawked if she had gotten more than just a momentary look.
The rim of the station held the spin-gravity rings, where they were shown their quarters, but much of the instruction took place in free-fall at the core of the station. Learning to move well in free-fall was part of the routine.
The routine was intense. The new cadets were given almost no time to acclimate, instead being thrown into their new life, the complex world of the Fleet. Parts of it, Zandy was sure, were intended to shock the cadets.
The quarters were not segregated by gender, and there were no provisions for privacy or modesty. That was a hard shock for Zandy, but the uniformity of it, the fact that all of the cadets were in the same place, treated the same way, made it a bit easier to deal with.
The biggest shock, for most of the cadets, was a trip to the Academy clinic for brain surgery. A few of the cadets already had direct interface implants that were up to Fleet standards. For all the rest, the Fleet provided an implant. The only mercy, Zandy found, was that it happened so quickly that she did not have time to be really scared. The cadets were ordered to the medical section without explanation, sent into surgery without delay, and the first moment that Zandy really had, at leisure, to consider it, was the day she was given to recover, before learning to use direct interface became part of her training.
There was a lot of training. Much of it was what Zandy had expected of military training: hard physical work, learning commands and basic discipline, learning the rules of the Fleet. Even more time went into class work; courses came at an insane pace; it was as if the instructors were trying to burst her brain, cramming in knowledge with a ruthless pace and efficiency.