Only Superhuman (46 page)

It would be a few minutes yet before intercept. Luckily, she had Zephyr’s voice to keep her company; the smugglers’ comm gear probably wasn’t good enough to pick their encrypted tight-beamed transmissions out from the general radio chatter that pervaded Ceres space even this far out.
“I think Lodestar will be a good leader,”
Zephyr said, his avatar projected onto her suit’s HUD.

“Yep. We’re in good hands.”

“If anything, her code name fits her new role better than her old one. Were I so inclined, I might consider that a good omen.”

“If you say so.” Emry gave out a contented sigh. “I’m just happy to be back in the fold. I’m a Troubleshooter again!”

“You never stopped being one, as far as I’m concerned.”
The silver pegasus cocked its head at her.
“What I’m curious about is whether you still consider yourself a Vanguardian as well.”

“Yes,” she said without having to think about it. “Whatever Thorne and Psyche did … those are still my people. My family. They’re a link to my father, and that’s something I don’t want to deny anymore.”

“I suppose the news of Thorne’s resignation carries some weight for you, then.”

“It’s a good start. We’ll have to see what happens next.”

Now she was close enough, the smugglers’ ship occulting the stars in front of her. Drawing her grappling gun, she made sure of her target lock, corrected for relative motion, and fired. In another moment, she was space-skiing behind the smugglers’ ship, reeling herself in on the grappler’s fullerene cable. “Still,” she went on a bit breathlessly once the acceleration eased, “I don’t think I’ll want to go back there for a while yet. The memories are too fresh.”

“I understand. Just as well our work will keep us busy.”

“Yeah. That’s what I need to do,” she said as she came up against the ship, climbing into the exhaust bell of one of its dormant rockets and tearing aside a sealing ring in order to slip into the interior hull space. “Save some lives, make a difference … have wild thank-you sex with every cute guy I rescue.”

The pegasus snorted.
“I see. So much for your newfound readiness to love.”

“Hey, if love happens, I won’t push it away anymore,” she said as she reached the rear bulkhead of the habitat section, took out a tube of cutting paste, and squeezed out a circular outline. “But I guess I don’t need it right now. Funny,” she said, shaking her head. “Before, I was always looking for a surrogate father and trying to push him away at the same time. I guess you were right about that Oedipus complex after all, buddy.”

“In this case, the proper Freudian term would be ‘Electra complex.’
”

She stuck a remote igniter into the paste and spread an airlock-gel membrane over it. “Really? I thought those were the guys who picked the presidents in America.”

“Well, Freud has been largely discredited,”
Zephyr replied without missing a beat.

Pulling back, she ignited the paste. The escaping air inflated the membrane into a dome, but it held. “But seriously—I’ve got you, got my job, my friends, a hot body … what more does a gal need?” Slowly, Emry squeezed her way through the permeable gel layer into the habitat section of the ship. Once it sealed behind her, she removed her helmet and torso unit and made her way forward to where a band of murderous space pirates lay in wait. she added silently.

Zephyr replied in kind.

If Zephyr wanted to get Emry riled up, it worked. And just in time too. An alarm sounded as the ship finally realized it had been breached. Three burly pirates carrying even burlier guns barreled through the hatch from the forward compartment, looking for the intruder. But Emry had already secreted herself in the corner by the hatch, and once they were past, she swung out and kicked the rearmost one in the ass, sending them all colliding into each other and scrambling to turn around in the tight space. “Looking for trouble, boys?” As they tried to bring their guns to bear on her, the Green Blaze gave them a saucy grin. “You just found her.”

APPENDIX A

Glossary

GENERAL TERMS

anti-radiation gene therapy:
Treatment providing human cells with radiation-resistant DNA repair proteins from the extremophile bacterium
Deinococcus radiodurans,
enabling the repair of even severe genetic damage. Essential for long-term human survival in space.

antispinward:
In the direction opposite which a habitat or other body is rotating. Sometimes called “west.”

asteroid family:
Main Belt
asteroids (
stroids
) that share common orbital characteristics, usually fragments of the same original body. Travel and shipping among stroids in the same orbital family demands relatively little energy.

AU:
Astronomical unit, the mean orbital radius of Earth, equal to 149.6 million kilometers or 499 light-seconds.

Bernal sphere:
Space habitat whose main component is a large residential sphere, with most habitation in the lower latitudes where the rotational gravity is higher. Other components include agricultural rings, nonrotating industrial sectors, heat radiators, docking hubs, and a detached external mirror to focus sunlight. To facilitate
precession
, the sphere and agricultural rings may rotate in opposite directions, or two counterrotating Bernal spheres may be linked to cancel their angular momentum. A habitat may be expanded by adding additional spheres, usually in counterrotating pairs.

bioprinter:
Device using microjet nozzles to deposit living cells into a desired three-dimensional pattern one layer at a time, replicating plant or animal tissues. Bioprinters are the main source of meat for Striders, given the limited land and resources available for livestock agriculture in space. Medical-grade bioprinters can manufacture replacement organs from a patient’s own stem cell cultures.

Bolasat:
Momentum-exchange satellite using long rotating carbon nanotube tethers to modify the trajectory and velocity of spacecraft. Weblike docking cradles travel along these tethers and intercept ships, shuttling them in or out until they reach their desired trajectories and are released, given a momentum boost by the tether’s rotation and the cradle’s speed. The Bolasat network allows faster and more direct intrasystem travel than orbital trajectories would allow. (Named for the ball-and-cord weapon known as
bolas
. The term
bolo
is sometimes incorrectly applied.)

CHON:
Acronym for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, the elements most essential for life as well as for Molecular-Age technology.

cislunar:
Within the orbit of Earth’s Moon. Also used by convention to include the Earth-Luna L2 and L3 points, which are technically translunar.

Coriolis (Cori) effect:
Fictitious force creating a deflection of a moving object from the perspective of an observer in a rotating frame of reference. Something thrown perpendicular to the direction of rotation will seem to curve to antispinward as the observer is moved in the other direction by the habitat’s spin. Also, since angular velocity increases with radius, an ascending body will enter a lower-velocity region, overtaking its surroundings and appearing to be pushed spinward, while a descending body will be outpaced by its surroundings and appear to be pushed antispinward.

C-type
or
carbonaceous asteroid:
Asteroid rich in
CHON
. Most habitats orbit C-type stroids and mine them for resources.

cyber:
Artificial intelligence, especially a sapient one.

drive beam:
A beam of ionized particles used to accelerate or decelerate a
magnetic sail
. Sufficiently powerful beams can impart very high accelerations, making them the fastest mode of intrasystem travel.

g-clip:
Small, strapless triangular covering for the female pubic area, held on by nanofibers using van der Waals adhesion (the force that allows geckos to cling to walls).

Kirkwood gaps:
Zones within the
Main Asteroid Belt
kept largely clear of debris by Jupiter’s gravitational resonance, named for their orbital ratios with Jupiter (for instance, a body in the 3:1 gap would complete three orbits for every one of Jupiter’s). The Belt is mostly empty space, with an average of six million kilometers between adjacent stroids, but uncounted micrometeoroids and dust grains pose a potential hazard to solar mirrors, delicate equipment, or spacewalkers. Many habitats thus choose the extra safety of the Kirkwood gaps over the advantages of residence around the major stroids. They capture small asteroids for resources and use thrusters to compensate for Jupiter’s long-term effects on their orbital stability.

Kuiper Belt:
Sol System’s outer and larger belt of minor bodies, located beyond Neptune’s orbit and containing millions of cometary bodies and dwarf planets. Visited by only a few crewed expeditions as of 2107.

Lagrange Points:
The five points of a two-body system where gravitational forces balance, allowing stable or semistable orbits around them. For instance, in the Sun-Earth system, the L1 point is between Earth and the Sun, L2 on the far side of Earth from the Sun, L3 just beyond the point directly opposite Earth in its orbit, and L4 and L5 respectively 60 degrees ahead and behind the Earth in its orbit. The first three points are stable only in a plane perpendicular to the line connecting them, so attitude-control thrusters are necessary to maintain orbit there. L4 and L5 are stable and can be orbited indefinitely.

light armor:
A close-fitting, flexible fabric woven from carbon nanotubes and synthetic silk, with a layer of synthetic-diamond scales, nanoactuators, computer circuitry, piezoelectric power fibers, and nanotube capacitors throughout its material. It enhances the wearer’s strength and becomes stiff in response to impact or pressure; it also provides resistance to weapons fire and extreme heat, cold, or radiation, and provides dynamic support to the muscles and joints. In case of injury, it can apply medical assistance, compressing to splint a broken bone or even to apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Lissajous orbit:
A quasi-periodic orbit around a semistable
Lagrange Point
, following a path that changes from orbit to orbit but remains within a specific set of limits. The simplest Lissajous curve is essentially a figure eight.

magnetic sail, magsail:
Propulsion system which generates a magnetic field around a spaceship, allowing it to be accelerated by the solar wind or a
drive beam
or to maneuver in a planetary magnetic field. Typically either a coil of superconducting wire or a magnetically confined loop of plasma, though the latter is too fragile to withstand a powerful propulsion beam. The magnetic field can also shield against particle radiation and solar flares.

Main Asteroid Belt:
Sol System’s inner belt of minor bodies, located between Mars and Jupiter. Smaller than the
Kuiper Belt
, but by convention the term “asteroid” is not used for bodies beyond Jupiter’s orbit. Some 75% of its 100,000-plus members are
C-type
or similar, though the Inner Belt is dominated by rocky S-type stroids with little
CHON
and is thus less populated by humans. Asteroid colonization began in the 2030s in pursuit of CHON to support cislunar habitats, since C, H, and N are rare on Luna. Near-Earth asteroids were the first to be mined, but scientific curiosity and the desire for independence, as well as the abundant resources of Ceres, Vesta, and other stroids, soon drew explorers and prospectors to the Main Belt. By 2100, it is home to hundreds of habitats and hundreds of millions of people.

metamaterial:
Nanoengineered material with a negative refractive index, making an object encased in it effectively invisible to selected frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.

mod:
Human genetically, bionically, or surgically modified with enhanced abilities or unusual cosmetic attributes. As a verb, to modify a human in this way. In
Strider
usage, if not Terran, this term implicitly excludes the basic enhancements ubiquitous among space dwellers, such as
anti-radiation gene therapy
and stem cell augmentation.

Molecular Revolution:
Twenty-first Century period when nanotechnology,
smart matter
, and molecular engineering revolutionized society and the economy, causing social collapse and a search for new values and solutions. Many new philosophies and subcultures sprang up in its wake.

O’Neill Cylinder:
Space habitat design capable of housing up to several million. The interior surface is generally divided into six rectangular sectors, with inhabited “valleys” alternating with sun windows admitting light reflected from large external mirrors. The hemispherical end caps are generally terraformed to resemble mountainous terrain. Industrial and docking sectors are at the free-fall hub, and agriculture is generally practiced in smaller outboard facilities. Cylinders generally come in tethered counterrotating pairs to facilitate
precession
.

plasma drive:
A high-acceleration drive using small amounts of antimatter to heat hydrogen to plasma and employing magnetic nozzles to increase the velocity and specific impulse of the plasma exhaust. Modulating the exhaust and antiparticle injection rate enables thrust up to several
g
for limited periods and lower thrust for longer periods.

plasma gun:
Variable-lethality weapon using a high-powered laser to create a small globe of atmospheric plasma at the target site and induce a supersonic shock wave within it, resulting in a forceful, lightninglike discharge of light, heat, and pressure. Can be calibrated to disorient, stun, or kill depending on power, or to create a protective “wall” of plasma discharges.