Deep Space. Ian Douglas

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      Chapter Six

       10 November 2424

       Intermundi

       Civilian Sector Green 7,

       Quito Synchorbital

       1915 hours, TFT

      Lieutenant Donald Gregory leaned back in his seat, taking another deep inhale of firedust from the golden sphere in his left hand. The nanometer-sized particles were absorbed directly through his sinus cavities and into his bloodstream, triggering a release of dopamine in his brain and a sharp, rippling wave of pleasure surging through his body. He gasped, then went rigid for a moment as the wave peaked, then ebbed. “Oh, yeah …”

      His right hand was clasped tight around the bare waist of Lieutenant Jodi Vaughn, who giggled as he started to come down from the hit. “Good stuff, huh?”

      “Babe, right now I’m flying! Wrapped up in metaspace and ’cubing at max!”

      They were in the Intermundi, a club located just outside the synchorbital naval base catering mostly to military personnel. Gregory had had the duty tonight, but Teddy Nichols had been willing to swap with him, allowing him to keep his date with Jodi. Located within a huge, rotating wheel, the club featured numerous small rooms heavily draped and cushioned, providing privacy and comfort, and with hidden arrays of netlink connections to cater to every pleasure need.

      Firesmoke was not addictive … not physically, at least, though Gregory had heard of pilots who’d developed emotional dependencies and needed partial memory wipes to shake them. Smoke worked through cerebral implants, which meant you could fine-tune the effect and clear the neural pathways afterward. The registered forms, served in joints like the Intermundi, were completely legal, though shipboard regulation frowned on using the stuff. They came down hard on you if you let it knock you off the duty roster.

      But it felt good … BETS, as the slang put it, Better Than Sex. And you could hit it again and again and …

      “You want some more?” he asked her.

      She accepted the sphere, held the sweet spot up to her face, and breathed in, her eyes closed. Firesmoke actually consisted of artificially manufactured receptor-key molecules tucked away inside C₆₄ buckyballs … carbon spheres so tiny they formed a nearly invisible mist. They were absorbed straight through the mucus lining of the sinus cavities, hitched a ride on blood vessels leading into the brain, and then unfolded inside the pleasure centers for a quick, hard jolt of pure ecstasy.

      Gregory watched Vaughn inhale the nanodust, watched the bright red flush spread down her throat and shoulders and across her breasts. They’d been sex partners now for more than four months, ever since just after she’d joined the squadron. What had started as a casual recreational fling had been … changing lately, growing into something deeper.

      He still wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

      Gregory liked Jodi Vaughn, liked her a lot. In a service that tended to attract aristocratic hotshots and fast burners, she was an attractive brunette from the Chicago megalopolis with neither money nor political connections. Rumor had it she’d started off as a Prim, an inhabitant of the half-submerged badlands of the Periphery in what once had been the city of Baltimore.

      Rising sea levels had flooded the city in the late twenty-first century; Wormwood Fall in 2132 had sent a tidal wave up the Chesapeake that had largely destroyed Baltimore’s remains, along with Washington, New York, Miami, and other low-lying East Coast metropoli.

      Over the next few decades, the old United States had abandoned the drowned and wrecked cities, vast coastal swamplands, for the most part, that became known as the Periphery. People continued to live there, and more had arrived from the more civilized reaches of the interior … criminals, scavengers, religious zealots escaping the laws of the White Covenant, and antitech Prims, primitives who didn’t care for the ways that modern technology was transforming the very definition of the word human.

      Most people didn’t care for the Prims. To be antitechnology alone meant you weren’t going to fit in with most people. It meant you were different. An outsider.

      And maybe that was why the Prim Jodi Vaughn had accepted Gregory when she’d been assigned to be his wingman. He was an Osirian colonial, perhaps the ultimate outsider, at least as far as the North Americans were concerned. She’d become his friend, and, before long, his lover. The two shared a lot in common. They’d not gone out of their way to flaunt their relationship, but some of the others in the squadron knew. Nichols, for instance. And probably that bastard Kemper as well.

      With considerable affection, he watched her take another hit from the sphere.

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