Ian Douglas - Battlespace

“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.