Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Confeds.
But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery—few medicines, no nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access at all—Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed to see her, though with no insurance and no credimplants, of course, neither he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.
He still remembered the snickers, the sidelong looks. A Prim, dressed in rags, pleading for help from the Confeds. And for a wife, of all things. In the Ruins, among the families, people tended to pair off, to form tight pair-bonds rather than the more typical looser social and sexual associations. Monogies, they were called, and if that Peripheral lifestyle wasn’t illegal, on the Mainland it was still widely believed to be possessive, dysfunctional, and just a bit dirty.
The soshies had taken him in and asked a lot of questions. They’d hooked him up to brain scans and thought monitors, and seemed fascinated by the fact that he could fly a broom without a direct neural interface. “That shouldn’t even be possible!” one caseworker had told him. “Have you ever thought of getting an implant?”
“Oh, sure,” he’d told her. “Absolutely! Just as soon as my insurance comes through!”
They claimed later he’d agreed to join the military, but he hadn’t. Well, not really, though he might have tried to give an impression of interest in the idea, just so they’d help Angela. Or maybe they’d taken his sarcasm as agreement. It was always tough to tell with the Authorities. They were a damned humorless bunch.
Join the military? Hell, no! All he knew was scavenging and Ruinrunning. He could barely read and write, and if the Authorities claimed that the squatters out in the Periphery were still Earth Confederation citizens, Gray and a few million other Prim squatters didn’t see it that way at all. They were free. The only law was what they themselves laid down and enforced. They didn’t receive any of the Authority’s protection, medical or financial services, education, clothing, Net access, entertainment, or food. They didn’t have Confed-recognized jobs or welfare status and they didn’t pay taxes. So how could anyone claim that they were citizens?
But then a Navy lieutenant commander had shown up in his black-and-golds and told him he was there to administer the Confederation oath. He’d bolted then, bolted and run. He’d found his broom where he’d parked it, on a landing balcony high above Harlem Bay, and launched himself into the night.
He’d been pursued by a hopper, but he’d eluded them.
They’d been waiting for him in the TriBeCa Tower apartments he’d shared with Angela.
The worst part of it all, the most awful revelation that had transformed his recruit training into a living nightmare, had been the discovery that Angela had … changed. They’d healed her. They’d grown class-three implants within the sulci of her brain, regrown sections of her organic nervous system, given her palm implants and an ID, even given her training as a compositer, whatever the hell that was, and assigned her to a job up in Haworth. The last he’d heard, she was living with some guy named Fred in an extended community.
She no longer loved Gray, and no longer wanted to see him.
The medtechs he’d talked to later had told him that that happened with strokes sometimes. Old neural pathways holding information on relationships, on emotional responses could be burned out by the neuron storm, lost even beyond the ability of neural prostheses to recapture them.
Gray wondered, though, how much was stroke and how much was reprogramming. Reconditioning. When they’d wired her to their machines and downloaded reading and writing, Cloud-Net skills and language training, social norms and Mainland mores, had they also told her what to believe? Who to love? How to love?
The last time he’d been able to talk with Angela, he’d asked if that had been what had happened. The simple question had made her angry, unreasonably so, he thought. “Damn you, Trev! Don’t you think I can think for myself?” she’d demanded.
Maybe she could. But … that hadn’t been Angela he’d been talking to. She was different now, and not just in her attitude or her use of language.
He’d known then that Angela, his Angela, was dead.
“You’re crying,” Dr. George said. She handed him a tissue and he accepted it, dragging it across his wet cheeks until the material evaporated and took the moisture with it as a microparticle aerosol. “We seem to have touched something.”
“Fuck you,” he said, but without much feeling. He felt dead inside, utterly wrung out and empty. “We’re done. I’m done. Get the hell out of my head. …”
Hangar Deck
TC/USNA CVS America
Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System
1740 hours, TFT
Commander Marissa Allyn stood on the walkway overlooking the star carrier’s main hangar deck, a vast and cavernous compartment three stories tall and over 150 meters long, a noisy, banging, bustling nexus of activity as returning fighters trapped on the recovery deck above and were brought down through the mergedeck barriers and into the pressurized interior of the ship.
The last of the Dragonfires had recovered back on board the America hours ago. Allyn had been brought back much later as a tow, rather ignominiously hauled in by the Search and Rescue tug. She’d been unconscious through most of the process, but she’d begun to come out of it as the tug hauled her into the turkey bay … carrier slang for one of the utility bay entrances.
They’d whisked her off to America’s sick bay facilities, where she’d been stripped and deconned, probed by robotic diagnosticians, and shot full of more nanomed healer ’bots. They’d put her on light duty and discharged her just twenty minutes ago; she’d come down here to find out how many of the Dragonfires had actually made it back safely. The numbers hadn’t been posted yet in PriFly, weren’t available on AmericaNet, and the pilots themselves were off the radar—presumably up in God’s country going through the debrief.
Which was where she would be going soon as well, once they called for her. In the meantime, she could talk to some of the crew chiefs or recovery deck personnel to get the “straight eye,” meaning rumors, gossip, or shipboard intelligence that generally was more accurate than the official word of God.
She’d been proceeding along the elevated walkway toward the recovery officer’s suite when a new arrival on the deck below had captured her full attention.
Flashing red lights and a hooter had cleared one particular part of the busy hangar deck—surrounding an elevator column extending all the way from deck to overhead, an area marked off by painted stripes, no-go warnings, and holographic barriers. The elevator began to descend, and the black nanoseal of the deck hatch in the overhead began to bulge downward, taking on the curving shape of the lower surfaces of a returning shuttle. The arrival was unusual for two reasons. First off, shuttles, like the SAR tug, normally recovered through a utility docking bay, not the main hangar deck. Troops
