Chapter 2

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The barracks were pretty swanky compared to Sonya Nero’s usual accommodations. Actual gravity had to be worth at least a full extra star when she got around to writing her travel guide. She felt a bizarre, almost maudlin thrill at the thought of using a toilet that didn't come with attachments and was disappointed that at the moment her system had been thoroughly flushed, sanitized, and bleached. You could eat off her intestinal walls.

A chorus of catcalls arose as she enters. Most of the waking twilight shift turned to look in her direction; the less-mature ones squeaked out things like “Who ordered the stripper” and “Must be my birthday,” but she just looked amused at them. They didn't mean any harm; they were just boys. Boots rained down on them from grumpy Marines who were trying to catch some sack time, and things returned to normal.

It smelled like cigarettes and ass in here. It was the sort of concentrated dude-funk that could only be cleared out by a crate of disinfectant and venting the chamber into Callisto’s carbon dioxide atmosphere. Bunks lined the walls and the center of the room in a head-to-head arrangement, each stacked two on top of the other. All told, around 64 Marines could crash out here at once. Footlockers hulked at the foot of each bunk, presenting the unwary with nearly endless potential to stub their toe on metal boxes each dense enough to forge swords on.

She’d been told to claim an empty locker, but in this context “empty” meant “the locker where everyone’s thrown their shit.” For all of Major Sylvia’s hard-assed speeches, it didn't look like anyone does inspections around here. She tried to avert her eyes from the pile of trash looming over the top of the footlocker; every second spent staring at it carried horrible new discoveries. She spotted fast food wrappers, which confused her slightly, but she'd been out of the loop and away from the Inner Colonies for a while. She saw a pair of boots with some kind of brown/black lumpy substance sprayed on them. The last thing she saw before she became horrified into voluntary blindness were condom wrappers, apparently “Anaconda Sized.”

She threw her duffel bag onto the bunk and deadlifted the locker, eliciting some protests from nearby grunts who offered to help out of passive sexism (a.k.a. chivalry). She shrugged and deposited it into the arms of the closest one, a chiseled black guy with abs so pronounced he seemed to like walking around without a shirt so he could make other men feel inadequate at the sight of his awesome six-pack. He wore a Catholic cross on a chain separate from his dog tags. Flanking Jesus on either side were two spent armor-piercing rounds on the chain.

“We’re goin’ to the Chute,” he said, leading her back out into the base. Navigation was much harder between the huddled groups of engineers without an officer of sufficient rank to frighten people away, but they soon learned that their data-crunching asses were no match for the forward momentum of a 230-lbs. man with a three-foot steel battering ram.

The Chute turned out to be a large hatch set into the bulkhead near a cargo elevator. It was a heavy, battered square set of vertically-opening double doors clamped shut with a lever mechanism. It looked like a huge dumbwaiter with a big red button nearby surrounded by caution tape. It was easily big enough to fit a half-dozen people or more, which was why numerous warnings are posted to exercise extreme caution not to fall inside. More recent warnings reminded the curious not to push anyone inside, not even if it’s really funny. Nero guessed that when activated, it drops whatever is put into it down to a recycler or (more probably) an incinerator.

“You here to replace Corporal Dweyer?” he asked, dumping the contents of the footlocker into the Chute.

“Probably,” she said, “but I’m not sure. This is where I’ve been assigned, is all.”

“Cool.”

“What happened to Dweyer?”

“Ehm, drugs they think. Overdose I heard.”

Nero nodded, although she didn't really understand. The rumor mill had only started to turn on that one.

“Nero, huh?”

“Yeah. What do they call you?”

“O-Face,” he said as he slid the dumbwaiter doors shut and slapped the red button. A stinging claxon sounded and Nero heard metal rapidly shift around inside.

“If I asked why,” Nero said, “would I regret it?”

An eavesdropping Marine in a muscle-tee stepped up to sling an arm around O-Face’s neck. He had a pair of shades perched on his head, which he flicked down over his eyes. “Because his ‘Oh Shit’ face looks like this,” he said, affecting a grotesque mid-coital bulge of his eyes mixed with a slightly nauseated ‘I-Can’t-Believe-I-Ate-the-Whole-Thing’ mien.

O-Face thumped an elbow into the guy’s ribs, “Corporal, this is Perfect Twenty. You about to see his oh-shit face.”

They were clearly playing around, and they wrassled around a bit until Nero flagged them down to regain their attention. “Okay okay,” she said, “you seen Sergeant Decker anywhere?”

“Deck was out on shuttle escort with Angel Squad. VIPs coming out from Helios.” Perfect Twenty fixes his shades back over his brow. “Dunno when he’ll be coming back.”

Twenty eyed her up and down, “Nero huh. Saw you on the news a while back.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Heard you were dead.”

Nero wasn't sure if he was teasing or not. Apparently neither was O-Face, who stepped aside. He was wisely staying out of this one. “They tried, but I guess I’m too mean to die. We got a problem?”

“Not sure,” Twenty smirked in a way she didn't particularly like, “we barely know each other.”

Nero decided to ignore him and picked up her footlocker with a nod to O-Face. “Thanks.”

They stayed behind, probably to gossip. She had a lot more trouble forging through the human obstacle course the hallways had become on the way back to the barracks. Clusters of people and rolling crates of equipment narrowed the corridors to irregular sections of one-way traffic, so she slowed down and picked her moments, merging into traffic carefully and pulling over to the side when it got too hairy.

Sometimes two engineering teams ran into each other oncoming in the hall: groups of six overall-wearing techies pulling along a heavy anvil case at their nucleus. They stared at each other uncertainly for a moment, then tried to negotiate through hand gestures, head-nodding and grunts which group should change formations into a single-file arrangement and squeak along the wall past the other. They seemed afraid to mingle or even get close to one another, as if one of their engineers might break off and join the other group like free electrons.

She tried to eavesdrop and find out what’s going on. This had all the earmarks of something dramatically messed-up with the design of this place, but the engineers looked more bored than terrified, so Nero wasn't too worried either. She didn't learn anything useful; they all spoke in acronyms, abbreviations, bulkhead serial numbers, and technical jargon. What she did gather was that they’re not nearly finished.

The barracks had regained a library atmosphere. The lights were also lower; the bunks of wakeful Marines were illuminated by the displays of P.C.I.s or consumer tablets as they displayed e-mail or satellite television. Nero realized that she must have oodles of useless e-mail to sift through considering how long she’d been out of reach. One of the few joys of her day was witnessing how much time and effort she'd saved through modern spam-blocking protocols by the size of the red number next to her junk-mail bin, and then looking in it anyway.

She replaced the footlocker where it was and was halfway through unpacking her duffel bag when she realized that she still didn't want anything of hers occupying the same space that someone’s mountain of discarded prophylactics formerly had. Not without some serious disinfectant and maybe the blessing of a priest. So she re-packed, shut the locker, and strapped on her P.C.I..

She was a little upset that it was a new one; took forever to get one broken in the way she likes them, like a pair of leather jeans that ran UNIX. She’d have to configure its display options the way she liked them and re-program all her macros. The armored bracer device was out of place with her uniform, but a Marine was rarely without it so it was almost part of the dress code for all but formal occasions.

It booted up by sheer virtue of being connected to her arm, automatically connecting to the local pub/sub network with her ID. It knew Sonya Lee Nero through a technology even more advanced than biometrics and so unusual that a new level of computer networking science was developed. Previously, the smallest kind of network conceived of was the Personal Area Network (PAN), a network that essentially consisted of one’s own nebulous concept of personal space. Things like wireless keyboards, cellular phones or maybe a digital watch that could talk to a desktop computer.

What computer scientists began to realize that networks could go farther than skin-deep. Nanotechnology allowed for tons of little computers to go racing around through the veins of injured patients, reprogrammed through radio waves to detect cancers or break up arterial clots. Sensors on a Marine’s brain or heart could detect injury or distress, triggering an implant near the adrenal gland to dispense a natural high. Some would argue (which scientists love to do) that this still constitutes a PAN, but rebellious academics nonetheless developed the Internal Area Network (IAN), then renamed it the Cyber Area Network because it sounded cooler. The Marine P.C.I. is a bridge, an interface between her CAN, her PAN, to the base LAN, the Callistoan MAN, and the solar system’s SAN. But it was really just a computer that could monitor her vitals and allow her to access the base’s computer network. The eggheads decided to slap another acronym on to the device that was a little easier to explain than the whole CAN/PAN/LAN/SAN/MAN thing, so they dubbed it the P.C.I. Ironically, Nero didn't know what it stood for.

Her e-mail downloaded automatically, but any orders from superior officers got bumped to priority spots at the top of the list. There were a few now; they certainly wanted to keep her busy. Word from the top was telling her exactly what Doctor Li had said:

Nero,

Report to the range ASAP for TargetLink recalibration. At 1400 hours report to Lieutenant Adam “Birdman” Byrd in Magnum Bay 1 with your squad. Launch and rendezvous with Cavalier Squadron in LO. Go to Jupiter F.P. and relieve Sergeant Decker who will further brief you.

Details and squad roster attached.

--MAJ. MARCOS SYLVIA

Nero popped the top off a bottle of pills and took enough (she hoped) to kill the marching band playing Souza in her head. No goldbrick, she. She changed out of her uniform and into some fatigues. Then she paged the rest of the Marines on her roster to get themselves wired and get to the armory by 1330. She headed there herself, as fast as traffic would allow. Not that she minded the trip; it gave her time for the buzz to kick in. By the time she got there, she was feeling pretty good.

“Hooah!” she thought to herself upon entering, “Where’s mah rifle?”