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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.

“Full thrust engaged!” she said, then handed the sphere back, gasping a little.

“How you feeling, Wing?”

“Like I could spit in a Slan’s eye.”

“The Slan don’t have eyes.” He frowned. “At least we don’t think they do.”

“Okay … a Nungie’s eye, then.”

“Nope. They have sensor clusters that process light—well, red and orange light, anyway, and short infrared—but they’re not really eyes. Squishy-looking tentacles and spongy tissue, more like.”

“Okay! Okay!” She laughed. “What are those three-legged octopus things?”

He had to pull down a list of known alien species inside his head and scan through an array of photographs. There it was.

“Jivad Rallam? Okay. They have eyes a lot like ours, agreed. Just more of them.”

“Fine. I could spit in its eyes. All of them!”

“Outstanding!”

Gregory stood up, stretching. The nanodust had left him feeling a bit light-headed and weak, almost trembling. He stepped to the entrance of their privacy area and looked up at the swimming sphere, internally lit with shifting, colored lights and hanging 20 meters above his head. Nude couples, threesomes, and a few larger groups cavorted within the shimmering globe of water.

The Intermundi Pleasure Club was an enormous structure, 100 meters across, rotating to provide about a half G of spin gravity at the outer deck, less on the elevated levels and walkways closer to the center. Outside the labyrinth of smaller privacy areas, the club’s interior opened up into a vast cavern. Transparencies in the floor looked out on the slow-wheeling stars of space punctuated occasionally by a blast of light from Earth or sun; multiple decks, verandas, and soaring arches gave a multilevel fairyland effect to the architecture, and at the exact center of the space a 10-meter bubble of water hung motionless as the club rotated around it. Gregory and Vaughn had chosen an open deck well above the main floor; spin gravity here was only about a quarter G, more than the moon but less than the surface of Mars, and the water was an easy climb overhead.

“Want to go for a swim?”

“No, I want something to eat. I’m hungry!”

“Whatcha want?”

“I’m feeling carnivorous. Surprise me.”

“One surprise, coming up.” He palmed a contact on the entrance to their cube, scrolled through the menu that opened in his mind, and selected Steak Imperial for two. What arrived in the receiver a moment later, hissing and moist, had never been within 36,000 kilometers of the Brazilian Empire, but the program that had assembled the component atoms and heated them to palatability had been designed by world-class chefs—probably AI chefs—and could not be distinguished from tissue that once had been alive and roaming the pampas south of the Amazon Sea.

“How do you think it’s going to end?” she asked him later, as they ate.

“What?”

“I was just thinking … so many alien species out there, and most of them seem to be on board with the Sh’daar and out to get us. We can’t face them all.”

Gregory shrugged. “Yeah, well, they seem pretty disjointed, don’t they? The Turusch attack us here … the H’rulka attack there … then the Nungies show up someplace else with their little Kobold buddies. They’re all as different from one another as any of them are from humans. Coordination, planning, even basic communication must be a real bear for them.”

The thought was not original with Gregory, but had been circulating through the squadrons as a series of morale downloads from the Personnel Department. It was propaganda … but it was propaganda based on fact and that actually made sense.

The Turusch were things like partially armored slugs that worked in tightly bound pairs and communicated by heterodyning meaning into two streams of blended, humming tones. The H’rulka were gas bags a couple of hundred meters across; they had parasites living in their tentacle forests that were larger than individual humans. The Nungiirtok were 3 meters tall and very vaguely humanoid … except that what was inside that power armor they wore was not even remotely human. The Jivad were like land-dwelling octopi that swarmed along on three tightly coiled tentacles, and used both speech and color changes in their skin patterns to communicate. The Slan used sonar as their primary sense, rather than a single weak, light-sensing organ, and apparently could focus multiple sound beams so tightly that they could “see” as well as a human; they couldn’t perceive color, of course, but according to the xenosoph people they could tell what you’d had for breakfast and watch your heart beating and your blood flowing when they “looked” at you. Communication for them appeared to be in ultrasound frequencies, patterns of rapid-fire clicks at wavelengths well beyond the limits of human hearing.

“That shouldn’t matter that much, should it?” Vaughn said. “I mean … those translators the Agletsch wear seem to work pretty well. Communications wouldn’t be that much of a problem for them.”

“No, it is a problem,” Gregory replied, “and a big one. Alien biology means an alien way of looking at the universe. Like the dolphins, y’know?”

Centuries ago, attempts to communicate with the dolphins and whales of Earth’s seas had demonstrated that differences in biology dictated how a species might communicate—dolphins, for instance, simply could not form the sounds required for human speech. And different modes of speech shaped how their brains worked, how they thought of themselves and the world around them. There were, Gregory knew, AIs residing within implants in dolphin brains now designed to bridge the linguistic barriers between the species, but those translations had only proven that dolphin brains were as alien to humans as the group minds of the abyssal electrovores inhabiting the under-ice ocean of Enceladus.

“Anyway,” Gregory went on, “the theory is that the different va-Sh’daar species have trouble cooperating militarily because of the biological differences among them. They’re so different from one another that the damned war has dragged on for fifty-seven years, now, and they still