Chapter 1

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More Marines washed out because of the cryo than anything else. In the old movies it was as simple as tossing a guy into a flash freezer and nuking that Marine Popsicle back to life like a frozen burrito. Then he’d leap out of a glass tube in a banana hammock, jiggle his pecs, salute the flag and give out a big ol’ “Hooah! Where’s mah rifle?” Unfortunately, the human body (even those of the Corps’ finest machines of ass-kickery) is far less-resilient to the abrupt thawing from a frozen solid state than your average Super-K Mexiburro. An imperfect comparison, to be sure, especially since nobody’s planning to eat the Marine after she’s defrosted. Still, the metaphor was sound when one considers all that can go wrong when cooking a brick of beans held in stasis. Too little and you get the “scorching-on-the-outside, ice-in-the-middle” scenario. Too much and you could solder titanium plates with that son of a bitch.

Sonya Nero knew it was significantly more complicated than that, but she cracked out the burrito story whenever civvies asked her what long-range space travel was like. Thinking of one’s outer skin, steaming and piping hot, with bones still colder than a mother-in-law’s kiss was enough to convey a small piece of how dangerous and how painful cryo still was. Nero didn’t know the whole science of it; suffice to say the labcoats had said they’d perfected the process within nominal acceptable levels (Scientist-speak for “You first”).

She was pretty sure that the process inflicted brain damage on a scale she doesn’t want to know about. You can’t just freeze blood, marrow, and all that delicate wiring in the brain. She’d heard concerns about “crystallization” and ice forming in those hard-to-reach areas of the gray matter, which is why they doped every cryonic subject with a shitload of drugs that made sure that crystal-thing usually didn’t happen. Once, when she was feeling particularly stupid, she asked what the stuff did and was told something about keeping her tissues “glassy, just not too frozen,” and gee, didn’t that make her feel so much better.

She didn’t know what they did to thaw the stiffs out. She was never awake for that, of course-- too busy being clinically dead. What she did wake up for was the sudden defibrillation from the implant placed on her heart. That was always a ride. Made her feel like she’d swallowed a liter of napalm and every part of her body like it’s fallen asleep after laying on it for about a hundred years. Trying to explain to anyone what it feels like to have your own head fall asleep took more charades and screaming noises than she usually felt up to.

The worst part for Sonya Nero was the headaches. Maybe there weren’t any ice crystals in her cortex, but it sure as hell felt like it. For two days after a thaw she could feel the sensation of massive icebergs crashing through the capillaries of her mind like the stampeding bulls of Pamplona. She always thought she should have bought into analgesic stocks, the way she pounded down mini-bottles of Aspirin like double-shots of whiskey.

A lot of people couldn’t take that. Most of them would cite an unwillingness to be separated from their friends and family for long-haul tours around the outer colonies; the trip took a few years, give or take a couple depending on relative orbital positioning. It was all crap. They couldn’t hack it through another trip as a frozen burrito. Nowadays it was the number-one cause of washouts long before they got their chance for their first kill. And if you’ve got circulatory problems the doctors don’t know about, well, vaya con Dios muchacho. Sorry about the brainfreeze.

And no, she would tell people, you don’t see a white tunnel of light when you’re that sedated. She liked to tell people that she’s been doing her job right; the light was red.

When they pulled her from her metal coffin, she was in too much pain and too stupid to think of much else other than how great morphine or a chambered pistol would be. But she’d been through the fridge enough times to catch the bullet points of the procedures the orderlies were putting her through. First they fired a penlight into her eyes to see if she was stone dead already. Then they stuck oxygen in her nose, thermometers in her ears, a syringe in her spine, and large-bore IVs in her arms. They sucked out spinal fluid and pumped in a mixture of chemicals, ostensibly to regulate her body chemistry and to neutralize the anti-freeze (whatever it was) they’d loaded her with.

Then they put in some hardware so large they didn’t even qualify as tubes. More like hoses. Doctors did this so often in the Corps that they didn’t even bother with finding veins; Marines came equipped with implanted catheters and electric contact points, used to blast pressurized cocktails of stims, drugs, antitoxins, inoculations, painkillers, depressants and who knows what else. Then they hooked these monstrous hose nozzles into the implants on her thighs and biceps. She could hear a machine churn to life that sounded like it was making yogurt, and she watches astounded as the tubes fill up with her blood, carries it into the machine, and throws it back into her body. Probably some kind of dialysis. Before she hated to watch this part; now it was just too awesome to look away.

“Migraine,” she grunted. They ignored her and rolled her into a medical scanner to take snapshots of her brain and organs. Why could they never give her something for the goddamn headaches?

“Welcome to Sisyphus 1,” said a woman’s voice, ringing with a tinny pitch around her in the imaging machine. She spoke over the intercom fixed inside the machine. “You’re currently on Callisto, Jupiter IV. I’m Doctor Li. Please hold as still as you can.”

More whirring and clicking. Nero’s implants itched to the point of burning, and she was acutely aware of the blood pounding in her ears. Even that barest of sounds seemed to resonate off the glossy panels of the machine’s interior. The intercom kicked on again with a small pop. “We’re almost finished here, Corporal. How do you feel?”

“Migraine. Your voice is making my brain hurt. Be quiet.”

“It’s perfectly normal,” Li said in a chipper tone, as if she’s most pleased that’s what her patient said. “But otherwise?”

“Stop talking or I swear to Christ I’ll put my head through this fucking intercom speaker.”

A brief silence over the microphone. It clicked on. “I’ll put down ‘surly’ on my pad, here.” But after that the doctor left her alone until they rolled her back out and threw a uniform at her. She didn’t feel like getting dressed or even sitting up, but being a Marine she was pretty used to that. Doctor Li swung into view, a crane-like woman with spindly arms and an overlong narrow nose. She had the kind of bright brown eyes a lot of women would kill for and a perpetual smile that was probably genuine but looked condescending.

She slapped a device that looked like a stethoscope without all the tubing on her chest, up against an electrical induction plate embedded just above her breast. And she must have been storing it in a tank of liquid oxygen because the damn thing almost clung to her flesh like a tongue to a frozen flagpole. The induction plates were attached to a miniaturized processor and a bundle of sensors that monitored blood pressure, heart rate, sugar levels, things like that. It speds diagnoses and made checkups an assembly line process that probably took a net total of fifteen seconds now, if that.

“What’s the date?”

Li gave her a brief (but smiling) look that read “Oh so now you want to talk to me” and says, “December 5^th , 2107. Woke you up in time for Christmas!”

Nero pulled her tank top on. “Have you got anything for my headache?”

“Later.” Doctor Li brandished a little electronic device with a long needle-like probe on the end. A little red LED flashed near the grip. “Pull your hair to the side, please. Time for a firmware update.”

“Jesus, again? I just had one before I got put in the cooler.”

“Yup. Good updates this time around, I hear. A few safety patches. Evidently a small percentage got seizures from the TargetLink when exposed to rapid strobes at around a hundred-ninety Hertz. Something like that.”

She stuck the datatap into the interface jack at the base of her skull. This really wasn’t going to help her headache. The device didn’t hurt, or even feel like anything’s happening. But it was uploading a ton of data, flashing new data onto the PROMs attached to the occipital lobe of her brain and various muscle control and twitch-centers of her cerebral cortex.

It did too many things to list—subtle stuff that she’d just grown used too—but they served to improve hand-eye coordination, jack her reflexes a little, and hardwire the sights of Marine weapons through induction plates in her hands, up her arms, and into her eyes. This stimulus manifested as a conscious TargetLink, a disconcerting ability to see through the computerized sights of her weapons. The Link was tied to muscle control and was able to read the specific brainwaves consistent with the “fire” impulse, allowing a Marine able to take a kill-shot at the speed of thought. Just don’t ask what it’s like to use one with your eyes open. Gave new meaning to the phrase “double-vision.”

The datatap tinkled out an upward ditty when it’s finished. Doctor Li pulled out the probe and told her the part of this Nero didn’t want to hear. “When you’re situated in the barracks, you’ll need to report to the range for a recalibration.”

Just what she wanted to do with a headache that could split mountains: fire a rifle. She had a lot of really good sarcasm lined up, but her brain hurt so badly that she decided it’s hardly worth it and so she just muttered “Kay.”

“Should be pretty easy to find your way around the station,” Li told her. “Everything’s well-marked and your P.C.I. will update itself. I’ll call the officer of the day so you can get the grand tour.”

Nero laced up her boots while Li made the call. Her nurse, a much older woman with a face like hardened mud ram a wireless diagnostic device across her body as a final check. Then she checked her range of motion, made her squat, swing her arms, and turn her neck. The neck was the real killer; even the nurse who’d seen a little bit of everything inhaled sharply when she got a look at the nightmare of scars and old burns that started just above her neck, ran along the trapezius, and down her left arm. She had enough metal in her neck and spine to build her own shuttlecraft. Moving her neck to either side after a period of rest was a prickly, horrid proposition that felt like trying to twist a plumber’s snake with her mind. But she did it.

When the nurse left, Nero fixed her hair to cover the ugly pale cicatrix as best as possible and put on her uniform jacket.

“Corporal Nero.”

She turned to look at the speaker, already starting to salute. A low-energy voice, terse and awkward. Must have been an unlucky SIGINT type who lost the draw for the O.D. armband today. Sure enough, it was a heavy-set administrative type wearing a lieutenant’s bars who probably pushed more pencils before noon than most do in a week. The nametag over his breast pocket read “MUELLER.” He looked like he’d rather be just about anywhere else instead of talking to a jarhead who he thought probably couldn’t even spell “quadratic equation” with a week and a math book.

“I’m supposed to show you to Supply and the barracks. So let’s go, I guess.”

The doors to sickbay groaned open and in stepped the station hardass. Nero could tell from the way non-coms scattered before him as he passed the windows on the way inside. Unable to flee, one grown man was blasted up against the wall by the sheer force of his authority, frozen saluting in rigor mortis. He walked past without even noticing his presence but Nero believed that if that guy hadn’t saluted, that officer would have swollen to six times his normal size, turned green, and beaten the poor bastard to death with his own legs. He was here to give his scary “me Alpha Male, you Jane” speech, make her scared, and never speak to her again.

He had a pitted face that looked like a toplogical survey of Callisto itself: pocked with old acne scars and covered with huge pores. He was missing an ear and probably his left knee, judging from the nagging limp that he toughed out with every step. Nero could tell that he’s already thought up a pretty good ass-chewing, and reminded herself to swallow her temper for the next few minutes.

“That’s all right, Lieutenant,” he said to Mueller, “I’ll show Corporal Nero around. You’re dismissed.”

“Yes sir,” squeaked Mueller obediently, swung his arm up, smacked himself in the face as a hasty salute, and evacuated the sickbay.

“At ease,” he said, but he really meant “put your arm down so I can yell at you properly.”

“I’m Major Sylvia, Corporal. Follow me.” The major lead her out of the sickbay and into the gridlike halls of the Military Quarter, an unimaginative stencil of a floorplan just like any other garrison in the colonies, only perhaps a little cleaner. Square shafts formed the halls, rounded into irregular semicircles by Byzantine stretches of pipe and conduit. It was all gray and white, lit by long racks of fluorescent white tubes and the tireless glow of exit signs and computer terminals. The corridors were choked with a strange percentage of engineers and techie types, each group overseen by a worried non-com. They all got out of Maj. Sylvia’s way like waves breaking against rocks.

“What do they call you?”

“Sir, the corporal’s name is Sonya Nero, sir.”

“I can fucking read, Corporal. What do they really call you?”

“Sir, Nero, sir.”

“Fuck that. You know what that says to me? It says you’re either lying or you ain’t done nothing worth making fun of. And I read your file, Corporal; I know how much of a fuck-up you are, and that’s just the shit they bothered to write down.”

Nero kept her mouth shut.

“Get this straight: the last thing I want is your narrow ass thrown into my lap like some political hot potato so you can embarrass me. You think because this is a garrison assignment that you can slack off and get away with your cowgirl bullshit, I promise you, you will walk out an airlock. And believe me, after Ixion you’re lucky I even agreed—“

Nero stupidly interrupted him, “I was cleared of any wrongdoing at Ixion.”

Sylvia was waiting for that; he spun on his heel like a bear trap closing. “Not with me, you weren’t. Not by a longshot, you fuckin’ rat. If it was up to me you’d be in front of a firing squad.”

“Well it was up to five officers at the general court martial, sir” Nero stupidly lipped off to him, “And I’m still here.”

“Ain’t you the fuckin’ loudmouth. Like I care that you wormed off the hook. When that big mouth of yours wasn’t selling out every Marine that survived, it was probably under the table choking down wrinkled cock. And unless you want to see another court martial, the next three words out of that mouth better be ‘Sir, yes sir’. Supply is over there. Get in there, get your kit, and find your own way to the barracks. You’re Sergeant Decker’s problem now, and if I even hear your name come up from now on I swear to Christ I will end you. Are we clear?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

She wobbled into Supply and slapped her palms on the counter, resting her head on the metal grille that separates the clerk from the rest of the world. “Migraine,” she commanded, but the clerk didn’t seem to speak Neanderthal. “Sonya Lee Nero, 4010121. I need my bag, my tags, and a bottle of pain pills. Price is no object.”