Earth Flight. Janet Edwards

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      I had my eyes closed and my face lifted, glorying in the sensation of warm water cascading over my skin. I ran my fingers through strands of squeaky-clean hair and inhaled the faint fragrance of shower spray. This was blizz. Utter ecstatic blizz!

      Someone hammered on the bathroom door, and I heard Amalie shouting. ‘Jarra, there’s a queue out here. For chaos sake, come out of there before you dissolve!’

      I groaned and reluctantly switched the shower to dry mode. Amalie must have heard the shower change note, because the hammering stopped. A couple of minutes later, I stepped out of the shower and stood gloating at the sight of my wonderfully unblemished face in the mirror. The hammering on the door started again.

      ‘I’m coming!’ I tugged on my robe, picked up my gun and my lookup from the shelf, opened the door, and faced a queue of three impatient people.

      ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I wanted to make sure I got rid of all the Osiris lily smell.’

      Amalie groaned. ‘You had an hour-long shower yesterday afternoon. We all told you the smell was gone afterwards. You still insisted on having two more showers and a swim in the pool. The. Smell. Has. Gone.’

      ‘I could still smell it this morning.’ I sniffed. ‘I think it’s gone now. I’m not sure.’

      Amalie sighed and went into the bathroom. His Excellency Captain Draven Fedorov Seti Raven had been leaning casually against the corridor wall waiting for me. Now he escorted me to my room, checking for threats with the tiny sensor in his left hand, while his right hand hovered close to his gun.

      I went into the room, found Fian already dressed in his uniform, and got dressed myself. When we went back out into the corridor, we discovered our bodyguard was talking to himself.

      ‘… understand that but I’m not happy. She’s a potential threat!’

      ‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with it, Birdy,’ said a disembodied male voice.

      I frowned. ‘Where’s that voice coming from, Raven? It’s not your lookup.’

      ‘It’s coming from the implant bonded to my skull,’ said Raven. ‘It’s SECOP talking.’

      ‘SECOP? Does that stand for Security Operations?’ I asked.

      ‘It does, Commander,’ said the voice of SECOP.

      I was startled. ‘You can hear me?’

      ‘In emergency mode, they can see and hear everything I can,’ said Raven. ‘In normal mode, my implant selectively relays statements prefixed with SECOP. Everything else remains private, but my implant has rolling two-hour recordings of everything I see and hear. In the event of my death, or traumatic injury, that data is automatically dumped to SECOP.’

      ‘It is?’ Fian pulled a face. ‘Next time you stick your nose into something private, I’ll have to remember not to kill you for two hours.’

      ‘Sorry again,’ said Raven. ‘It sounded like an intruder was attacking you.’

      I smothered a giggle. The previous night, Fian and I had celebrated my recovery from the skunk juice by watching a new episode of Fian’s favourite vid series, Stalea of the Jungle. It ended with Stalea throwing her boyfriend across a jungle clearing, pinning him to the ground, and forcibly kissing him. Fian and I were happily re-enacting this scene for our personal entertainment, when an Adonis Knight heroically charged into the room to save us from being murdered.

      In the interests of peace, I tried a random change of conversation. ‘Don’t the protection of humanity laws apply to implants?’

      ‘Implants aren’t banned like robots or clones,’ said Raven, ‘just restricted by the same rules as gene therapy. You can use them to treat medical and cosmetic problems as long as they don’t enhance someone’s abilities beyond the normal human range.’

      ‘You’re claiming an internal comms system is normal for humans?’ asked Fian.

      ‘No,’ said Raven, ‘but when Military Security agents are undercover on assignment, a visible external comms unit can get them killed. I’m claiming that’s a cosmetic problem that justifies using implants instead.’

      Fian frowned. ‘You’re bending rules that exist for very good reasons. I’ve been arguing with my father for years about this, because my great-grandfather was a member of Cioni’s Apprentices. A huge amount of scientific knowledge was lost in the Earth data net crash. We’re still blindly accepting many things as facts because records state they were once proved. Cioni’s Apprentices were trying to recreate the lost science and proofs, find out what was true or not for themselves.’

      He shrugged. ‘I agree with my father that’s a good thing to do, and totally support other scientists working on it, but Cioni’s Apprentices went to inhuman extremes. They didn’t just cause the Freya conflict, and the Persephone incident, but the horror of what happened on Gymir. We need the protection of humanity laws to stop that sort of thing happening again.’

      Raven gave Fian a startled look. ‘Your great-grandfather was an Apprentice? Well, yes, I agree the Apprentices took things too far, but plenty of things bend the rules a little. Look at the dome cleaning system. The autovacs break the rules on both robots and artificial intelligence.’

      ‘No they don’t,’ said Fian. ‘They can’t create another robot, they fail the Owusu intelligence ratings, and they have no digits capable of manipulating …’

      I knew the real disagreement here was still about Stalea of the Jungle and privacy, so I gave a pointed cough. ‘I’m starving to death.’

      The other two abandoned their argument and we headed to the hall. Raven stopped just inside the doorway, following his regular morning routine of tensely surveying the room for a few minutes, presumably checking to see if any of the class showed signs of having turned into psychotic killers overnight. Fian and I carried on walking to the food dispensers, collected our breakfasts, and went to join Dalmora, Amalie, and Krath at our usual table.

      Krath shook his head at us. ‘I still don’t understand why you’ve got an Adonis Knight as a bodyguard.’

      I shrugged. ‘Colonel Leveque said he picked Raven because it would be impossible for anyone to bribe him.’

      Krath sighed. ‘Yes, the families of the first Adonis colonists all got land grants in perpetuity, so Raven must be stinking rich. I wish I was. All the girls would throw themselves at me.’

      Dalmora, Amalie, and I gave him matching glares. Krath hastily changed the subject.

      ‘Draven Fedorov Seti Raven.’ He started counting on his fingers. ‘Draven is the randomly generated gender specific. Fedorov is the historic reference. Seti …’ He broke off. ‘I’ve forgotten again.’

      Dalmora had already explained the Adonis Knight naming system three times, but she patiently did it again. ‘Seti is the month of the fourteen-month-long Adonis year when he was born, and Raven is the Earth nature reference.’

      ‘It’s too complicated,’ said Krath, ‘and randomly generating a name is a nardle idea.’

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