Ian Douglas - Bloodstar

Halfway up, just below the 36,000-kilometer level, is the Geosynch Center, which is a major node of communications and industrial facilities clustered around the elevator, both in free orbit and attached to the cable. It’s also the location of the big solar reflector arrays. Starport, however, is all the way up at the top, built into and around the surface of the five-kilometer asteroid used to anchor the elevator and keep it stretched out taut—a stone tied to the end of a whirling string. Ships launching from Starport picked up a small but free boost from the centrifugal force of the elevator’s once-per-day rotation.

I went ashore with Doob and HM3 Charlie “Machine” McKean, flashing our electronic passes at the AI of the watch and riding the transparent docking tube from Clymer ’s quarterdeck up to the planetoid in a transport capsule.

It was quite a view. The George Clymer was nestled into the space dock facility on the planetoid’s far side, the location of Starport’s Commonwealth naval base. A dozen other ships were there as well, including the assault carrier Lewis B. Puller , three times the Clymer ’s length, ten times her mass, and carrying four squadrons of A/S-60 and A/S-104 Marine planetary assault fighters, plus numerous reconnaissance and support spacecraft. There were civilian ships as well, including a couple of deep interstellar research vessels, the Stephen Hawking and the Edward Witten .

Most of the Starport planetoid is in microgravity. The rock itself doesn’t have enough mass for more than a whisper of gravity of its own, and this far out from Earth, the centrifugal force created by its rotation amounts to about 0.0017 of a G.

That means that if you drop a wineglass, after the first second it’s fallen one and a half centimeters—a smitch more than half an inch—and there’s plenty of time to catch it before it hits the deck.

But, of course, you don’t want to be drinking out of a wineglass in the first place. Things still have their normal mass in microgravity, if not their weight, and once the wine gets to swirling in the glass it will keep moving up and out and all over you and the deck in shimmying slow-motion spheres.

Which was why we were headed for the Starport Nearside Complex, the small space city constructed on the Earth-facing side of the planetoid, better known as the Wheel. It’s a kilometer-wide wheel encircling the up-tether from Earth, and rotating once a minute to create an out-is-down spin gravity of about half a G.

We caught the thru-tube that whisked us from the Starport Terminal through the core of the planetoid and deposited us at the hub of Wheel City. From there, we floated our way into the rotating entryway and rose through one of the spokes, the sensation of gravity steadily increasing as we rose farther out from the hub.

The Wheel holds the heart of the Commonwealth Starport Naval Base, including the headquarters and communications center, support facilities, and a Marine training module, but over half of the huge structure is civilian territory, a free port administered directly by the Commonwealth. The Earthview was a bar-restaurant combo located in one of the Wheel segments, and it came by its name honestly.

The entryway checked our passes as we walked in. One entire wall, from floor to ceiling, was a viewall looking down-tether at Earth.

The disk appeared about thirty times larger than a full moon from Earth, a dazzlingly brilliant swirl of azure seas and intensely white clouds and polar caps. The planet was in half-phase at the moment, with the sunset terminator passing through Ecuador and down the South American spine of the Andes Mountains. It was late summer in the northern hemisphere, so the terminator ran almost straight north up the Atlantic seaboard. South, the bulge of Brazil was picked out by the massed city lights of the megapolis stretching from Montevideo to Belém.

North, of course, the New Ice Age still held northern New England and much of Canada in a midwinter’s death’s grip, despite all the efforts of the mirror array at Geosynch. The Canadian ice sheets, especially, were blinding in the afternoon sunlight.

At the moment, the viewall image was coming through an external camera somewhere on the planetoid; the Earth and the starfield behind it weren’t rotating with the Wheel’s stately spin. I could see one of the elevator capsules on its way up-tether, gleaming bright silver in the sunlight.

“You been here before, e-Car?” Machine asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I admitted. “I like the view.”

Doob cackled a nasty laugh. “View is right! The girls here are spectacular !”

Which wasn’t what I meant, of course, but, hey, when the man’s right, he’s right. The Earthview was actually divided into halves, separated by a soundproof bulkhead. The side reserved for civilians was rather genteel, I’d heard—fine dining at exorbitant prices, the food delivered by robotic waitstaff indistinguishable from FAB (flesh and blood). They even served real beef there, shipped up-tether for the financial equivalent of two arms, a leg, and the promised delivery of your firstborn.

The Earthview Lounge next door, however, was a bit … livelier. Naked FAB waitresses, live sex shows on the black, fur-padded central stage, and throbbing, full-sensory music fed directly through the patrons’ implants and going straight to those parts of the brain responsible for hearing and feeling. And the girls were gorgeous, ranging from exotic genies to BTL sexbots to winsome girl-next-door types. The joint wasn’t reserved for the military, not officially, anyway, but I doubt that most civilians were all that comfortable there. The fleet was in, and enlisted personnel tended to get a bit territorial with their liberty hot spots.

Doob and Machine and I let the door deduct the cover charge from our eccounts and we wandered in, looking for good seats. An enthusiastic ménage-à-quatre was writhing away on the stage, backlit by the half-full Earth, and the place was flooded with blue-silver earthlight. A hostess wearing a plastic smile and some luminous animated tattoos showed us to a table close to the entertainment and took our drink orders. The mood music, a piece I half recognized by Apokyleptos, literally felt like hands running over my body; the audible part was too damned loud, but I dialed my reception down a bit and it was okay after that.

A waitress brought us our drinks and one of those smiles, and we leaned back in the chairs to enjoy the show. I’d ordered a hyperbolic trajectory—vodka, white rum, metafuel, and blue incandescence. I tossed it back, shuddered through the burn, and after that I didn’t care quite so much about screwing up with Howell. After my second glass, I didn’t care at all about Howell, and after the third I didn’t care much about anything .

“So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”

“I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”

“What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”

“S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “ if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.

“Don’t you?” McKean asked.

“Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.

“So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”

Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.