Getting dressed together in those close confines was almost as much fun as getting undressed earlier. It was easier when they helped one another, since there was hardly room enough to bend over. It would be nice, Ramsey thought with wry amusement, if the people who designed these ships would acknowledge that people needed sex, and included sufficient space for the purpose—maybe a compartment with padded bulkheads and conveniently placed hand- and footholds—not to mention locker space for clothing and perhaps a viewall for a romantic panorama of a blue-and-white-marbled Earth hanging against a backdrop of stars.
But unfortunately, that just made too damned much sense.
The Derna, first of a first generation of interstellar military transports, was designed with efficiency of space, mass, and consumable stores in mind, not the erotic frolickings of her passengers. She had to keep thirteen hundred people alive for a voyage lasting years, even with relativistic effects, which meant that every cubic centimeter was carefully planned for and generally allotted to more than one purpose.
If the damned sleep cells had been just a little larger … but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He’d tried it during the past month … twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn’t that liberal yet.
Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations was supposed to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they’d been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that there would be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.
But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians … especially civilian lawmakers.
Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, “In case of war, break glass.” Marines weren’t supposed to have families, friends, or lives.
And they certainly weren’t supposed to have sex.
They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. “Again tonight, after duty?” he asked.
“Sorry, T.J.,” she told him. She kissed him gently. “I’m going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I’m shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?”
He nodded, masking his disappointment. “Sure.” Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules.
Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians, he thought. He’d been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.
Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. “Logic center is clear,” he told Delgado, sotto voce.
“Aye aye, sir.” Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He’d promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn’t be turned aside.
At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.
Eighty percent of the MIEU’s troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybehibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydrocarbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The Derna needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was Derna’s primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near-c velocities.
But the MIEU’s weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn’t yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up- or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship’s manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780 grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board the Derna.
But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.
As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He’d shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.
“Good morning, Colonel,” Cassius said. “You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged ‘urgent’ or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time.”
Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.
“Two Priority Ones?” he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. “Shit, why didn’t you tag me?” The command group’s AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.
“I felt you needed the downtime, sir,” Cassius replied. “You’ve been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—”
“Can it. What were the calls?”
“One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms.”
“I see.” He would have done the same. “And the other?”
“From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out that Derna is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he