The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young. “I’m Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?”

      “Of course.”

      The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. “Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?”

      “Drag bag?”

      “Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—”

      Norris frowned. He’d seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I’ve been in zero g before.”

      “Very well, sir. If you’ll just follow me?”

      Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he’d been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

      Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin’s rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

      It’s all in your mind, he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. “Mr. Norris?”

      “I’m fine, damn it,” he said. “Lead on!”

      The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

      Inside Derna’s inner hatch, a sign had been attached to one wall saying QUARTERDECK, next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. “Permission to come on board.”

      “Permission granted.”

      An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go.

      At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the words DECK and FEET TOWARD HERE painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator.

      The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator’s gentle acceleration away from the ship’s spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.

      The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He’d never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.

      He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”

      “It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It’ll smell a lot worse, believe me!”

      Norris didn’t doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

      “The head—that’s the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There’s a common area in each hab module … Deck Two, one down from here. That’s where the mess deck is, too.”

      Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn’t room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”

      “On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir … for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”

      He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? In here?”

      Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh … actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The Derna carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That’s twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship’s crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”

      “Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”

      “In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”

      He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found … located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber’s ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship’s computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of micro-miniaturization.

      “It’s not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.

      “You won’t need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You’re scheduled for cybehibe in …” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship’s net. “… twelve more days, sir. At that time, you’ll be plugged into the ship’s cryocybernetic system, and you won’t know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”

      “Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost. Acceptance. “Twelve fucking days.”

      11

       8 AUGUST 2138

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