Ian Douglas - Battlespace

The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf of the tower, almost five hundred stories above the brilliantly lit sprawl of Greater Los Angeles. Garroway, Anna Garcia, Roger Eagleton, Regi Lobowski, Tim Womicki, and Kat Vinton stepped onto the platform, resplendent in newly issued Class A dress uniforms. A stiff wind off the ocean chilled and Garroway pulled his formal cloak a little closer about him. Eagleton paid off the transport with a wave of his newly issued asset card.

“You sure we belong here, Gare?” Kat asked him.

“I gave the flier’s AI the address,” Garroway told her. “This must be it.”

“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?”