“You’d better go,” the waitress told the Marines, dropping her voice.
“The lady’s right,” Ramsey told his friends, pressing his palm to the credit reader on the table to pay the outstanding bill, then standing. “Let’s move on. We don’t want trouble.”
“Yeah!” a civilian called from the next table. He sniggered. “Run home to mommy and daddy!”
“Back off, mister,” Ramsey growled. “This isn’t your business.”
“Not my business, Muh-rine?” the kid said, standing and turning to face Ramsey. “I’ll fucking make it my business if I want. You freaks aren’t wanted here.”
“That’s right,” another of the punks said. “You pretty-boy gyrines’re nothin’ but trouble. Who let you out without your keepers, huh?”
“You lousy little civilian shit—” Aquinas said, starting forward.
Ramsey put a hand on his arm. “Belay that, Marine. Outside. Now.”
A moment later, they stepped onto the plaza beneath the Comet Fall’s strobing sign. The concourse was a wide, sweeping mall lined with multi-tiered shops, bars and eateries, with a vast arch of transparency stretched overhead. Earth, half-full, hung directly overhead.
Chu looked up at the blue and white-mottled orb, frowning through his alcoholic haze. “Why aren’t we falling?”
The question, though garbled, wasn’t as drunken-wrong as it sounded. Each structure within the Rings circled Earth once in twenty-four hours, maintaining geostationary position. They should all have been in free fall, but the gravity here was roughly equivalent to the surface gravity on Mars, about three-tenths of a G.
Vallida laughed at him. “Jesus! You just now noticing, Chu-chu?”
“Gravity …” Ramsey started to say, then tripped over a hiccup. “Gravity engineering,” he finally said. “Quantum-state phase change in the … in the …” He stamped his foot. “Down there. Subdeck infrastructure. Haven’t you ever been to th’ Rings?”
“Nope. Born’n raised on Mars. Never left until I joined up, and they fuckin’ send me to Alighan. …”
“There they are!”
Harsh voices sounded behind them. Ramsey turned, and saw the gang from the Comet Fall spilling out into the street. They were looking for trouble, looking for a fight.
“Heads up, Marines,” Ramsey said. He was fumbling through the mental commands that would revive his personal AI. If he could connect with the watch on board Samar … or even with the nearest Shore Patrol base. …
“You pretty-boys need to be taught a lesson!” one of the gangers growled. He was big, heavily muscled, and evidently having some trouble focusing. “You pretty-boys shouldn’t be coming into our part of th’Ring. …”
“They ain’t all pretty-boys,” another civilian said. He pointed at Colver and Vallida. “Them two are kinda cute, for Muh-rines.”
“Then we’ll be gentle with them,” the first said, with a nasty laugh.
“Yeah,” another said. “We’ll give them special treatment. But the rest of ’em—”
Ramsey slammed the heel of his palm into the kid’s nose before he completed the statement, snapping his head sharply back. The other Marines flowed into action in the same instant; Ramsey heard the crack of one punk’s arm as Vallida broke it, heard another ganger choke and gurgle as Gonzales drove stiffened fingers into his larynx, but he was already stepping across the body of the one he’d downed to block a punch thrown by a screaming punk, guiding the fist harmlessly past his head, locking the wrist, and breaking it. The kid shrieked in pain, then went silent and limp as Ramsey hammered the back of his head with an elbow.
The whole encounter was over within five seconds. The six Marines stood above fourteen bodies, some of them unconscious, some writhing and groaning as they cradled injured limbs or heads or groins. A fifteenth punk was disappearing down the street, running as fast as his legs could carry him.
“Not bad, Marines,” Colver said. “Considering our, uh, slowed reaction times.”
“Slowed, nothin’,” Ramsey said. He reached down and extracted a tingler from the unconscious grip of one of the civilians. He checked it, switched it off, then snapped the projector in half, flinging the pieces across the street. Several of the punks were armed, and the other Marines proceeded to similarly disable the weapons. “We just gave them the first shot … to be … to be fair. Right?”
“Whatever you say, Gunnery Sergeant,” Gonzalez said. “But maybe we should hightail it before the SPs show up.”
“Yeah,” Vallida said. “Someone’s bound to’ve reported this.”
“Roger that.” He looked around. She was right. Habitats, even extraordinarily large ones like the Ring habs orbiting Earth, tended to have lots of cameras and other unobtrusive sensor devices, both to monitor the environment and to watch for trouble of a variety of types—including crime. He didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing; most covert surveillance cameras, such as the ones the Marines themselves used to monitor battlespace, tended to be smaller than BBs, floating along on silent repulsor fields.
As he completed a full three-sixty of the concourse terrain, he became aware of another problem, one more immediate than having the local police watching the Marines mop up with some local thugs. “Uh … which way?”
His hardware included navigational systems, but he’d not bothered to engage them when they left the Samar earlier that evening. He suddenly realized that, in his current somewhat befogged state, he had no idea as to which way Dock 27 and the Samar might be.
“I think, boys,” Colver said, “we’d better switch on our AIs. Otherwise we’re going to be going in circles.”
That was easier said than done.
Most enlisted Marines learned how to disable their company AIs temporarily within days of leaving boot camp, and some probably figured out how to do it while they were still boots. Hell, for that matter, Garroway was pretty sure that officers did it, too, right out of OCS or the Naval Academy. No one ever talked openly about it, of course, because it was against regs. Getting caught was at the very least worth “office hours,” as commanding officer’s nonjudicial punishment had long been known in the Corps, and in some situations, like combat or while embarked on board ship, it could get you a general court and a world of hurt.
The process was simple enough, and involved visualizing a certain set of code numbers and phrases, which you brought to mind one by one and held for a second or so. It provided a kind of back door to the AI’s programming. It saw and recorded the code, then promptly forgot about having seen it, or anything at all about the person doing the coding, until another set of codes was visualized to reset the software.
The problem was that you needed to have a clear and highly disciplined mind to be able to pull the visualization trick off. At the moment, all six of the MARS Marines were somewhat less than clear in the mental department. Not only were their minds sluggish with alcohol, but under the influence of the nano activators in their drinks they were having trouble focusing on anything with much clarity or discipline, much less memorized strings of alphanumeric characters.
“Wait a sec,” Chu said. He was standing still, eyes closed, arms outstretched. “I almost have it. …”
They waited, expectant.
“No. I guess I don’t.”
“Someone