The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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      “I don’t know how the Navy pukes stand it, man,” Staff Sergeant Shari Colver told him. “The boredom would drive me straight out the nearest airlock ricky-tick.”

      “Hey, that’s why they spend most of their time in cybehybe,” Ramsey said with a shrug.

      They were sitting in the ship’s lounge, a small and Spartan compartment that combined rec hall with mess deck and was normally reserved for the use of the shipboard in-transit watch. The domed overhead showed a backdrop of stars; if one studied the star patterns closely enough, individual stars appeared to move from hour to hour—the nearest ones, at any rate … but the effect was a lie, an illusion generated by the Samar’s navigational AI.

      The fact of the matter was that it was impossible to see outside of a starship traveling within an Alcubierre spacetime bubble.

      In 1994, a physicist named Miguel Alcubierre had first laid the groundwork for the space drive that later bore his name, when his equations demonstrated that—in theory, at least—a wave of distorted spacetime, expanding behind and contracting ahead, could carry a spacecraft along at faster-than-light speeds. No basic physics were violated in the movement; Einstein’s prohibitions against FTL had been directed at mass and energy, not at the fabric of space itself, and, in fact, it was eventually determined that the entire universe had naturally expanded faster than the speed of light in the opening moments of its own birth. A ship in the warp of the Alcubierre Metric might slip quietly across flat spacetime at the rate of nine light-years per day, but since it was motionless relative to the encapsulated spacetime immediately around it, it avoided completely such inconvenient effects as acceleration, relativistic mass increase, or time dilation.

      But by the nature of the space-bending field around it, a vessel under Alcubierre Drive, also was effectively cut off from the universe outside. There were no navigational vid views outside the hull for the simple reason that there was nothing to see out there save the enveloping black. Encased within a bubble of severely distorted space and time, Samar and her passengers remained completely deaf and blind to their surroundings, and the slow-drifting stars electronically painted on the lounge overhead represented the navigational AI’s best guess as to what should be visible outside. It was, in fact, little more than an elaborate planetarium display.

      But even the display of an educated guess was essentially boring, the patterns of stars changing so slowly the novelty wore off after a very few hours.

      Still, Ramsey and the other waking psych-wounded on board tended to spend a lot of their off-hours here. The cool, K0 star circled by Alighan was located in the constellation Ophiuchus, as seen from Sol, and after the first three weeks or so, star patterns in the sky opposite Ophiuchus, ahead of the Samar, had begun to drift into recognizable constellations, albeit shrunken and distorted. Day by day, those constellations opposite Ophiuchus in Earth’s sky, including the easily recognizable sprawl of Orion with the prominent three-in-a-row suns of his belt, became more and more evident.

      Ramsey and Colver were sitting in one of the double lounge recliners, a side-by-side seat that let them watch the stars. They’d been watching Orion, and wondering if Sol was visible yet somewhere within that dusting of stars ahead.

      No wonder, Ramsey thought, passengers and crew alike in A.D. ships spent the passage in cybe-hibe, save for a small, rotating watch. The planetarium display did little but emphasize just how tiny Samar was within a very large galaxy. That sort of thing could wear unpleasantly on the healthiest of minds.

      “Did you ever wonder,” Colver asked him after a long while, “why we’re doing our therapy time shipboard? Why didn’t they just pack us away with everyone else, and start unscrambling our brains once we get home?”

      Ramsey looked around. Three Navy enlisted ratings were playing cards at a table on the other side of the compartment. They didn’t appear to be listening to the two Marines, though the space was small enough that they could have, had they wanted.

      “I never thought about it, no,” Ramsey replied. “I mean, they have the psych AI resident in the ship’s Net, so it’s there and available. They’d need it for ship’s crew, just because the isolation could drive people off the deep end. So, as long as the software’s there anyway …” He shrugged. “Why, is it important?”

      “I dunno. I’ve just been in the Corps long enough to know they do everything for a reason, even if that reason doesn’t make a whole lot of sense up front. I was just wondering if they do it in-transit because we are so isolated out here. No distractions. Nothing to do but count the days until we get home.”

      Ramsey managed a chuckle. “Well, hell. I can just imagine Karla trying to talk to me back at the Ring, and all I want to do is put on my civvies and hit the airlock. The Arean Ring is pretty good for liberty.”

      “You call it Karla?” she asked. “Mine is Karl. For Karl Jung.”

      “Yeah. Depends on whether the patient relates better to men or women. You know, another possible reason for shrinking us out here … they can control what they put in our heads.”

      “How do you mean?”

      “Think about it. Out here, it’s just us and our … our memories, right?”

      She nodded. Ramsey didn’t know exactly what had happened to Colver on Alighan, but it was probably one of a relatively few but common problems. Stress shock—what once had been called post-traumatic stress syndrome—or survivor guilt or anxiety attacks or, like Ramsey, she’d lost someone important to her and was dealing now with the depression. Whatever it was, he could see echoes of grief, fear, and sadness in her eyes.

      He wondered if his own eyes betrayed his inner demons that clearly.

      “Well,” he went on, “if we were back on the Ring—unless they quarantined us all—we’d be going out on liberty and visiting family, getting drunk, getting simmed—”

      “Getting laid,” she put in.

      “Sure, that, too. We’d probably get ten kinds of advice from family and friends back there, all about how to put all the bad memories away, get over it, forget about it, and move on, y’know?”

      “And what they’re telling us here, Karl and Karla, I mean, is that we have to look at the memories. Deal with them.”

      “Yeah. Something like that. Unless we let them memwipe us, we’ve got to deal with our shit. We can delay it, we can play all kinds of games, we can pretend it never happened, but, sooner or later, we’ve got to face it.”

      “You sound like Karl.” She smiled.

      “I wonder why?”

      “So you think they don’t want us contaminating our minds with input from our families?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Okay, but they let us talk together. They don’t have us isolated from all human contact. They even have the group sessions, where all of us get together and talk.”

      “True. But then … we’re all in the same boat, literally, right? Same general experiences. Same problems. And Karla, Karl, I mean, is there to facilitate.” He thought about it a moment. “It’s kind of like being in the Corps. We’re all Marines. Family, y’know?”

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