Ian Douglas - Battlespace

“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.