The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator’s gentle acceleration away from the ship’s spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.
The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He’d never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.
He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”
“It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It’ll smell a lot worse, believe me!”
Norris didn’t doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.
“The head—that’s the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There’s a common area in each hab module … Deck Two, one down from here. That’s where the mess deck is, too.”
Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn’t room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”
“On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir … for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”
He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? In here?”
Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh … actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The Derna carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That’s twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship’s crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”
“Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”
“In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”
He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found … located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber’s ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship’s computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of micro-miniaturization.
“It’s not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.
“You won’t need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You’re scheduled for cybehibe in …” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship’s net. “… twelve more days, sir. At that time, you’ll be plugged into the ship’s cryocybernetic system, and you won’t know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”
“Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost. Acceptance. “Twelve fucking days.”
11
8 AUGUST 2138
Sick Bay
U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center
Parris Island, South Carolina
1430 hours ET
“Garroway!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Through that hatch!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.
“Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn’t the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn’t remember.
Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.
Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.
“Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
“Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
The corpsman wasn’t even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.
“He’s go,” the man said.
The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.
“Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”
This was it, at long last. It felt as though he’d been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.
It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He’d learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to get his technic prostheses back.
Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn’t feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?
“Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”
“Sir … I don’t feel—”
“Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It’ll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You’ll be damned hungry, though. They’ll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”
He fell