Battlespace (7 page)

“
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
, ei
ther, 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.

“Captain Warhurst!”

“You boys okay?”

“A little fuzzy yet, sir,” Garroway said.

“Yeah,” Womicki added. “Sir, you gotta get us out of here. These civilians are freakin' crazy!”

“What happened?”

Garroway tapped the side of his head. “Not sure, sir. Things got a little tight at a party we were at. Next thing I know, a voice in my head is telling me I'm in violation. And then…lights out.”

Warhurst nodded. “Social monitor.”

“Yeah, but what is it, sir?” Eagleton wanted to know. “I don't remember giving permission to have anyone tamper with my 'link!”

“It was part of your agreement when you got to leave the base. Remember thumbing a nonaggressive clause?”

“Sure,” Lobowski said, leaning up against the transparency. The plastic was several centimeters thick, but the speaker system let them talk and be heard. “It said to stay out of trouble. We figured, ‘Hey, no sweat. We're not lookin' for trouble.'”

“Did you read the fine print?”

“What fine print?” Womicki said. “It was a download.”

“Well, you should have heard someone telling you that you were being given Class 5 nanoingests.”

“You mean when they gave us something to drink?” Garroway asked. “I didn't hear anything about nano in the stuff.”

“Mm. Well, we'll check that out later.”

“What kind of nano, sir?” Womicki asked.

“Short-term autodegradable. Chelates with your current implant and creates a temporary low-grade AI that acts as a kind of watchdog. You get out of line, it puts you to sleep.”

“
Shit!
”

“Things have changed a bit since we were out on Ishtar,” Warhurst told them. “The brass is concerned about how we behave in public.”

“So they feed us monitor nano?” Garroway said, bitter. “Such a splendid reflection of civilian respect for us. Sir.”

“Like I said, things have changed.”

“There were two women with us, sir,” Garroway said. “Vinton and Garcia.”

“Staff Sergeant Dunne is springing them, Garroway. I'm here for you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don't thank me. You'll be facing a mast for disorderly conduct.”

“But sir,
they started it
!”

“Freeze it down, Garroway. You boys put your foot in it. Part of my agreement with the authorities is that you go up before the Man. Copy?”

“Yes, sir. Copy.” He swallowed. “Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Did they make you take that monitor nano for you to come down here?”