Battlespace

“It” was a graceful series of curving walls and partial domes built into the side of one of Greater LA’s newer skytowers. The landing platform was broad and edged with walled gardens and gene-tailored landscaping. Several other skytowers gleamed in the night in the near-distance, self-contained arcologies, some 5 kilometers high and each holding a small city in its own right. The one named Raphael, an implant download told Garroway with a whispering in his mind, had been completed ten years ago and packed 950 stories into a column 3.8 kilometers tall. It housed 15,000 people in spacious luxury, as well as hundreds of shops, stores, restaurants, theme malls, indoor parks and plazas, recnexi, and tobbos … whatever those were. People could live out their entire lives in Raphael or one of the other condecologies and never set foot outside.

To Garroway, that seemed a sterile kind of life, hardly worthy of the name. Still, different people, different customs. …

“Hey, even if it’s the wrong address, it’s worth it just getting offbase for a bit,” Anna Garcia said. “I didn’t think they were going to let us go.”

“I sure don’t know what the hassle is, that’s for damned sure,” Womicki said. “With all the form screens we had to thumb, you’d’ve thought we were trying to smuggle in ancient high-tech artifacts or something.”

“Whoa,” Eagleton said, nudging Garroway in the ribs. “Look at this!”

A woman walked out to meet them in a swirl of luminescence. She was strikingly nude; nanoimplants within her skin glowed in constantly shifting colors visible through the translucence of her skin, pulsing between deep ultramarine blue and emerald green. Her delicate tuft of neatly coiffed pubic hair had been treated as well; it glowed brightly, cycling from bright yellow to orange to red to gold to yellow again, creating interesting contrasts of hue against the deeper, inner glow of her thighs and belly. Her face and hair, however, were masked behind a silver, visorless helm. A spray of optical threads created a dazzling cascade of moving green and amber light rising over her head and spilling down each side to the ground.

“You didn’t tell us we had to dress for dinner, Gare,” Anna whispered at his side.

“Johnny!” the woman cried. “So glad you downjacked!”

“Uh … Tegan?”

“Who else?”

He gave an awkward grin. “Sorry. I didn’t recognize you … uh … dressed like that. I appreciate your asking us out here tonight.”

“Hey, no skaff.” The cold didn’t appear to bother her. “The mere the meller, reet? These your hangers?”

He blinked. Her speech was quite rapid and laced with unfamiliar words. “I guess so. Uh … these are my friends, the ones I told you about. This is Corporal Kat Vinton, Corporal—”

“Vix the IDs,” Tegan said, waving a glowing hand. “Leave it for the noumens.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You don’t expect me to downrem names, do you?” She laughed. “Grampie, you are synched out! C’mon!”

“Does ‘grampie’ mean what I think it does?” Anna asked.

“‘Grandparent’?” Eagleton replied sotto voce. “‘Grandpa’? That’s my guess.”

“Are you understanding any of this, Gare?” Kat asked him in a whisper as they followed the woman toward the building entrance.

“Oh, a word here and there,” Garroway admitted.

“‘Johnny’?” Eagleton said and snickered.

“That was my civvie name,” he said. “John Garroway Esteban. But I dropped the Esteban on my naming day, and I lost the John in boot camp.”

He wondered just how much in common he had with Tegan now. He’d given her a netcall as soon as they’d been informed that the com interdict had been lifted, and she’d sounded happy to hear from him. She’d invited him and anyone he cared to bring along to a numnum … whatever the hell that was. They’d approached Staff Sergeant Dunne and, after a few frustrating hours of red tape and a lot of questioning, received passes. Garroway had the impression that there were some high-level complications in the request, but he didn’t care about the details. Just so long as they could get out of Twentynine Palms for a few precious hours.

“So who is this Tegan?” Anna wanted to know.

He shrugged. “A friend. I met her down in Hermisillo a few years ago. A few years before I joined the Marines, I mean. She was on winter vacation at a resort down there.”

“Just a friend?” Womicki asked.

“Well, no. More than that.” That had been before he’d started seeing Lynnley.

“I got news for you. She’s too old for you now, son,” Lobowski said. “‘Out of synch,’ huh?”

“Oh, she looks pretty well-preserved,” Eagleton said, eyeing her glowing back as she led the way through a high, curved archway and into the party proper.

“Yeah,” Womicki said. “Almost as well-preserved as us.”

Garroway shook his head. The objective-subjective time difference was taking some getting used to. Cybehibe did not entirely stop aging, but it did drastically slow all bodily processes by a factor of something like five to one. That, coupled with the effects of time dilation, meant that Garroway and his fellow Marines had aged less than a year biologically, while Tegan had aged twenty.

Of course, anagathic treatments were becoming more common and less expensive on Earth. At the base, Garroway had already met people who were over a hundred years old, but who looked no older than fifty. Someday, perhaps, thanks to nanomedical prophylaxis, age might not matter at all.

But in the meantime, it could be disconcerting. Tegan had been a year younger than he when he’d left Earth.

Inside the doorway, the floor dropped away in a large, roughly circular room sunken in the middle, with alcoves and balconies at various levels on all sides. A warm, indirect ruby-hued lighting made walls and ceilings hard to discern, a dreamscape of subtle, sensuously curving forms. Everything appeared to be made of moving red light, and it was tough to see what was solid wall or floor and what was not.

And the place was packed.

The six Marines stopped and stared, their mouths comically open. There must have been hundreds of people present, standing, sitting, or lying a-sprawl on the thickly scattered divans that appeared to have grown out of the floor. Many, men and women both, were nude or nearly so, though most wore bangles and elaborate high-tech helmets that completely masked their faces, and their skin glowed with myriad inner hues. Those not stripped down were wildly dressed up. Garroway wondered if there was a competition under way for the most elaborate and eye-popping costume.

“Is this your home?” Kat asked the woman.

“What? Are you seerse? This is a sensethete, of course! It’s called the Starstruck, and it’s part of the conde. Part of the service, y’know?”

“Take your cloaks?” a gleaming, streamlined machine floating above the floor asked. Garroway and the others removed their cloaks, draping them across the robot’s waiting and multiple arms. “And your clothing, ladies and sirs?”

“I beg your pardon?” Womicki asked.

“When in Rome, Mick,” Garroway said, gesturing at the crowd.

“I think I’ll keep my uniform on, thank you,” Kat said.

Garroway agreed. “We’re fine,” he told the hovering robot. It hummed in what seemed a disapproving manner, but then floated off into the encircling red mist. Casual and social nudity had long been accepted throughout most of the southern and western states, and there was little privacy for males or females in a Marine squad bay or on board ship. Privacy wasn’t an issue.

However, this was different. The other guests weren’t completely bare, but were adorned in myriad ways, with nanoinduced internal lighting, with devices that appeared to be grown into the skin itself and with various items of jewelry. There was, Garroway thought wryly, a large difference between nude and naked. The six Marines would have looked somewhat akin to plucked chickens in this gaudy company, and at least their blue with red and white trim Class A’s gave them some ornamentation.

“You’ll need these, grampies,” Tegan said, returning to them. She held out a pair of delicately shaped and filigreed helmets. A helmed, winged angel with fluorescent violet tattoos and a handsome man wearing a low-cut seventeenth-century ball gown handed them four more.

“What are these for?” Lobowski wanted to know, turning one uncertainly in his hands.

“You don’t viz techelms?” the angel asked. He laughed.

“G’wan!” the guy in the ball gown told them. “Put ’em on and down ’em! You’ll jack!”

Hesitantly, Garroway slipped the helmet he’d been given onto his head. The visor was opaque, blocking all vision. He felt a warm tingle at the back of his skull and at the temples.

And then …

Color and light exploded around him, and he heard a murmuring ripple of multiple conversations in his head. He could see now, despite the opaque visor. Somehow, the helmet was taking in his surroundings and transmitting them directly to his implant. He could see more clearly, more crisply than before, and was aware of a tumbling avalanche of detail.

It was, in fact, a little like being linked into a tactical net in combat, except that this was accompanied by an odd, very deep, and very sensuous inner movement of feeling and emotion. It took him a moment to identify it: pleasure.

“How’s that feel?” Tegan asked him, her voice sliding into his mind like liquid silk. “Nice?”

“It’s … interesting.”

And it was going to take some getting used to. It wasn’t that he minded the sensation of pleasure itself. It was the fact that these pleasurable sensations were coming and going, emerging, building, exploding all without any thought, movement, or input from him.

In fact, the sensation was like what he’d always imagined a nano-induced high might be like, one that involved all of his senses. As he looked about, he realized that the bodies of the people around him were subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—enhanced. The men seemed more handsome, more muscular, more athletic, while the women were slimmer, more beautiful of face, more generous and perky of bosom. The man in the ball gown was now a lovely woman, and the gown itself an explosion of blue and silver starlight. Many of the guests were no longer even human; a radiantly green and golden lion with eagle’s wings stared at them from a nearby dais. Other shapes were more outlandish—zoomorphic, angelic, demonic, or mixtures of the three. Were they real? Or illusion? Or some subtle combination of the two? Some shapes morphed and shifted from one thing to another as he watched.

And he could hear things, conversations he’d not been able to hear before, and it was impossible to tell whether he was hearing actual sound or picking up on a mingling interchange of surface thoughts.

“Oh sure, and the flam did the jug out of a whiter, reet? …”

“And so she was neg way, and then I was yeah, way, and then she was neg way, and then …”

“So’dja hear the zit on Chollin and Vashti? …”

“Well, Ran and Silva and me, we all vammed down to Cancun for a bit of a vaccshi, and …”

“So I was getting bored, totally weed, and there was this new religion, Galaninism, and I thought, reet, why not, it can’t be as moomy as the Church of the Mindful Stars …”

“So why’d Teeg invite them? Fascists. …”

That last had cut through the other conversations with a peculiar bitterness. He tried to focus on it, and picked up a few more words.

“Ah, you know how the Army is, always narbing in and invading places where it’s not wanted. …”

“Hey, did you hear that?” Eagleton said aloud, looking about.

“Ignore it, Rog,” Garroway told him. “We’re guests here, remember?”

“Besides,” Kat added judiciously, “they’re obviously talking about someone else. We’re not Army.”

Garroway took a cautious couple of steps, feeling for the deck beneath his feet. It was, he thought, like stepping into a dream, one where nothing was quite as it seemed.

“Here,” someone said in his mind. “Groz this, grampie.”

A silver and black metallic sphere was placed in his hand. As he looked at it, trying to get an idea of both what it was for and what its true form might be, it twisted itself in his palm, opening itself. A thick lavender mist spilled out and he caught the tang of cinnamon. And … something else. As he inhaled, he felt the rush exploding out of his lungs and throat and tingling all the way down to his toes and back up his spine to the crown of his head. The helmet took the sensation, amplified it, twisted it … and fed it back to him in rippling pulses of feeling.

“Is this stuff legal?” he heard Lobowski say.

“What a ridic question!” a woman’s voice replied, a sensuous gliding of thoughts. “This is a numnum, mem?”

Garroway tried to meditate on this self-evident truth, but was having some trouble focusing.

“What the hell happened to the floor?” Eagleton asked.

Good question. When Garroway looked down, he could see the floor beneath his feet as swirling patterns of rainbow-hued pinpoints of light. Each hesitant step he took sent out widening ripples of flickering color, ripples that interlaced with other ripples in spectacular moving moirés of colored light.

And the voices. Something similar was happening with all of the voices in the room. Garroway could no longer be sure which were voices he was hearing in his head, and which were actual, audible sound. He was hearing more and more, however, and the words and sentences seemed to be weaving together into an incoherent yet meaningful whole. Behind it all was … was that music? Not quite. It was a kind of rhythmic pulse or ticking, but with something else unidentifiable beneath, a kind of deep and somehow musical longing without any actual notes.

That was interesting. Several couples were engaged in sex play on a round divan off to one side of the sunken room. Garroway found that when he watched them, he could actually feel some of what they must be feeling … touches and caresses and warm, moist, sliding pressures. The helmets, he realized, were somehow letting everyone in the room share in an overpowering gestalt of emotion and sensation.

The blending of heightened sensations was having a marked physiological effect on him, as well. Garroway could feel a familiar pressure building in his loins, and an intense and unscratchable itch.

But more, his feelings were oddly jumbled, melding one into another and transforming as they did so. Deliberately turning his back on the lovemaking tableau so he could concentrate, he tried to tap into his implants for a download on what was happening, but couldn’t access his system. At that, Garroway began to feel genuine alarm.

“What the hell’s going on here,” he heard himself say, his voice sounding very far away.

“What’s the downskaff, grampie?” A woman hovered in front of him, hugging-distance close. How had she gotten there? “Don’tcha rax with it? Isn’t it a flittering rish?” Her voice curled sensuously through his brain.

Garroway wasn’t certain whether it was whatever had been in the sphere or the helmet—or both working together—but he was beginning to feel as though all of his senses were blurring together. He was seeing sound, hearing color, tasting the pressure of his feet on the unseen floor and of his uniform on his skin. The conversation swirled around him, caressing him, a living thing experienced rather than merely heard.

“You’re del says you were actually, like, in the body on another planet,” the woman’s voice continued in his mind. “Is that, like, for real?”

Funny how that one voice stood out from the others, obviously addressed to him, yet somehow intertwined with all of the other conversations going on. It was like being both an individual and some kind of communal, many-in-one intelligence.

“Sorry … ‘del’?”

“You know! Download! From your implant!”

The woman was staring at him with eyes brilliant as blue-white stars. Who was it? Not Tegan … someone else, someone he’d not met before. He tasted her hand on his shoulder. She was gorgeous, an ethereal creature of radiant light.

“So? Howz’bout it? Were you really on another planet?”

“Uh … yeah. Ishtar. I was there.”

“Ishtar … yeah? What a zig! I been there too!” A rapid-fire barrage of images flickered through Garroway’s mind—scenes of Ishtar, with Marduk vast and swollen in a green sky; of the native An, like tailless, erect lizards with huge golden eyes; of the stepped pyramids of New Sumer so reminiscent of the ancient Mayan structures in Central America; of the vast and eerily artificial loom of the mountain they’d called Krakatoa; of a claustrophobic sprawl of mud huts and city walls, of dense purple-black jungle.

“Wait a minute. What do you mean, you were there too?” This glowing woman was neither a Marine nor a scientist, of that he was sure. She hadn’t been onboard the Jules Verne, either, and no other ships had returned from Ishtar since the original voyage of discovery thirty years ago.

“Sure! In sim, y’know? Most of the folks here grozzed a simtrip to Epsilon Eridani right here just last week!”

“Oh. A sim …” Well, that made more sense. With the right hardware and AI programming and decent sensory records of the target, a direct download to your cerebral implants could make it seem as though you were actually there … at the bottom of the ocean, walking the deserts of Mars, or exploring the jungles of distant Ishtar.

“Well, yeah,” the woman said. She sounded exasperated. “Why vam it in the corp, y’know? And it takes so long. A numnum feed is much better. Don’t send the mass. Just send information, reet?”

He was beginning to gather that numnum must be a corruption of noumenon. The techelms, apparently, allowed everyone wearing them to share not only surface thoughts, but emotions and sensations as well.

He must have been broadcasting some of his bemusement. “Don’t you Army types groz numnum feeds?” she asked.

“Not … Army …” he managed to say. Speech was difficult. “Marines. …”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

“No, damn it. It’s important. Marines.”

What were they doing to him? Reaching up, he fumbled with the helmet, then pulled it off.

Instantly, the falsely heightened colors and sensations dropped away. The woman of light was now … just a woman, a bit overweight and sagging despite the efforts of some decades, he thought, of anagathic nano. She was wearing nothing but sandals, jewelry, and a silver techelm. Without the light show she was not as disconcerting to look at, and from what he could see of her mouth and hair, he guessed she was rather plain behind that opaque visor. He actually liked her better this way.

But she was already turning away, losing interest.

Where were his friends? Funny. He’d thought they were still right there next to him, but they appeared to have dispersed through the crowd.

He slipped the helmet back on, hoping to spot them. The explosion of color and thought hit him again, but he found he was now able to zero in on their location.

“I wasn’t talking to you, creep! Back off!” Was that Anna’s thought? It sounded like her. He tried to locate her in the crowd.

Ah! There she was, halfway across the room, easy enough to spot now in her Class A’s, surrounded by several helmeted men and women.

“So who invited you, Teenie?” one of the men was saying. The conversation did not sound pleasant.

“Hey, I said back off,” Anna said aloud. “I don’t want any trouble.”

“Well, you got trouble, lady,” one of the women told her. “We don’t like your kind around here.”

“Hey, hey,” Garroway said, wading into the small crowd gathering around Anna. “What the hell is this all about?”

A waspish-looking man with an ornate silver and gold helmet shaped to represent a dragon turned the visor to face him. “This little Aztlanista thought she could grope our party, feo. Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a U.S. Marine, like her. And I happen to know she’s no Aztlanista.”

“Her del says her name’s Garcia,” the woman said. “Latina, reet?”

“So? My family name was Esteban,” Garroway told them. “And I was born in Sonora. You have a problem with that?”

“Yeah, we have a problem with that. You Teenies are freaming bad news, revolutionaries and troublemakers, every one of you!” The woman reached out and grabbed for the front of Anna’s uniform.

Faster than the eye could see, Anna blocked the grab, snagged the arm, and dropped it into a pressure hold that drove the woman to her knees, screaming. One of the men moved to intervene, and Garroway took him down with a sharp, short kick to the side of his knee. Spinning about, he took a fighting stance back to back with Anna. The crowd glowered, but came no closer.

“I think you milslabs better shinnie,” a man said.

“Yeah,” another agreed. “Ain’t none of you welcome here, zig? Vam out!”

Garroway looked around, searching the room for the rest of the Marines. Kat and Rog were coming fast, both tossing aside their helmets as they shouldered through the crowd. And there were Tim and Regi. All right. Semper fi. …

For a moment, he wondered if they would get into trouble—fighting in a civilian establishment. Fuck it! They started it! …

But then a sharp, hissing static filled Garroway’s ears … his mind and thoughts. Staggered, he raised his hands to his ears, trying unsuccessfully to block the literally painful noise. His vision began to fuzz out as well, blurring and filling with dancing, staticky motes of light.

An implant malfunction? That was nearly unthinkable, but he didn’t know what the civilian techelms might have done to his Marine system.

“What’s … happening? …” he heard Eagleton say. The other Marines, too, had been stricken. That elevated the static from malfunction to enemy action.

But who was the enemy? The civilians surrounding them? That didn’t seem likely.

“You are in violation of programmed operational parameters. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

The voice, gender-neutral and chillingly penetrating, rose above the static.

“Huh? Who’s that?”

“This is the social monitor AI currently resident within your cereblink. Hostile thought and/or action against civilians is not permitted. Desist immediately.”

“What AI?” Womicki demanded loudly. “What’s goin’ on?”

The shrill hiss grew louder and louder, driving Garroway to his knees. Anna Garcia collapsed beside him, unconscious.

And a moment later he joined her. …

Police Holding Cell Precinct 915 East Los Angeles, California 2312 hours, PST

It had been, Captain Martin Warhurst thought, inevitable. Marines back from a deployment—especially one as long and as rugged as the mission to Lalande 21185—needed to go ashore and let off some steam. His people had fought damned hard and damned well on Ishtar; they deserved a bit of downtime.

But downtime too often turned to fighting, chemical or nanoincapacitation, and rowdy behavior frowned upon by the civilian establishment.

The guard led him down a curving passageway to one of a number of holding cells, bare rooms walled off by thick transplas barriers. This one was occupied by twenty or thirty men, with expressions ranging from dazed to sullen. Four, however, recognized him immediately and came to their feet.