by my in-head. He stopped, looked around … and our eyes met. He smiled and started walking toward us. His pace was slow, shuffling, and a bit awkward; I pegged him as a groundpounder, someone who hadn’t been in space much and wasn’t used to walking in low-G.
“What’s the matter?” Joy asked. She must have seen the blank look on my face while I talked with my secretary.
“We’ve got company,” I told her. “Wait here.”
I got up and walked over to meet the guy. I pinged his ID as I approached, and got a readout: Christpher Ivarson, Global Net News. By the time I reached him, three-quarters of the way up the curve of the sphere, I was at a slow simmer but well on my way to coming to a boil.
“Petty Officer Carlyle—”
“What the fuck are you doing, following me around?” I demanded. “Can’t a guy have any privacy?”
“You’ve been blocking our newsbots, sir, and we really would like to have you answer a few questions.”
“Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been blocking you,” I told him. “Such as … I don’t want to answer your questions.”
“This will only take a moment, really.”
“No. This ends now. I’m having dinner with a friend and I will not have it spoiled by the likes of you!”
“Now, don’t be like that, Elliot! If the Central Asian Caliphate was behind the hijacking of that asteroid, the public has a right to know! And after all, the Hero of Bloodworld will have a unique perspective on the attack! You might not know it, but Elliot Carlyle is big news right now! First Bloodworld and the Qesh, and now you’re charging a terrorist stronghold with the U.S. Marines! Great stuff!”
“Oh … you want a … what did you say? A unique perspective?”
“Absolutely! If you could just—”
“Here you go,” I told him, reaching out with both hands and grabbing the lapels of his stylish maroon tunic. Bending my knees, I shoved upward … hard.
As noted, the spin gravity at the Free Fall’s equator was around four-tenths of a G. Three-quarters of the way to the sphere’s pole, which was at zero-G, the gravity was a lot lower … maybe a tenth of a G, or even a bit less. The GNN reporter probably massed eighty kilos, but he only weighed about eight here … about as much as a large cat, so once I got him moving he kept moving, moving hard. My shove sent him sailing up into the air, arms and legs thrashing … and he yelled bloody murder when he realized he wasn’t coming down again.
Gravity inside rotating systems like the Free Fall is tricky. Ignoring things like air resistance, he technically was in zero-gravity as soon as he left the deck, but the Coriolis effect caused his straight-line path to curve alarmingly against the hab module’s spin. For a moment I thought I’d misjudged, that he was going to miss.
Then one thrashing arm snagged the safety net surrounding the central sphere of water thirty meters above the restaurant’s deck. He screamed again and grabbed hold with both arms and both legs, dangling far overhead.
Of course, the net was turning with the rest of the module, so hanging on up there he probably felt a spin gravity of something like fifteen hundredths of a gravity … maybe twelve kilos. If he let go, he’d drift back to the sphere’s inner surface with a tangential velocity of, oh, a few meters per second, and if he didn’t fall into some diner’s salad, he’d be just fine.
But for someone born and raised on Earth, the possibility of that thirty-meter drop between the outside of the safety net and the restaurant floor was terrifying. The net enclosed the water sphere from pole to pole; it was designed to catch people falling out of the water and keep them from dropping onto the restaurant clientele. Ivarson only needed to clamber along the outside of the net until he reached one of the access tubes at the sphere’s axis.
But panic had set in, and all he could do was cling to the outside of the net and howl.
I returned to Joy, who was watching the spectacle overhead. “What in the world …?”
“Out of the world, I’m afraid.”
“Why did you—”
“Reporter,” I told her. “The bastards have been dogging me electronically ever since Zeta Capricorn, and now it looks like they’re siccing humans on me.”
“Excuse me, Petty Officer Carlyle?”
I turned and found myself facing a polite but stern Free Fall employee. I didn’t know they had bouncers in places like that.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
I looked up at Ivarson, whose shouts and screams by now had become the focus of attention for every patron in the Free Fall. A couple of men in work utilities were making their way across the net to reach him.
“He’s a reporter,” I said. “Gross invasion of privacy.”
“I quite understand, sir. Still, our guests have a right to enjoy their meals without … spectacles of this nature. I can ask you to leave, or I can summon the shore patrol.”
“No need,” I said. “Joy? You can stay and enjoy your meal, if you like… .”
“What, and miss a date with a man who can throw an asshole thirty meters? You’ve got to be kidding!”
So we left. We never did get our homegrown steak and lobster.
But it turned out to be a spectacular evening nonetheless.
Chapter Five
I got the call next morning to report to Second Lieutenant Singer’s office on board the Clymer, up-El at Starport.
The Commonwealth’s Starport One Naval Base occupies the five-kilometer asteroid suspended at the high end of the space elevator, the stone spun at the end of a whirling string that keeps the string nice and taut. The docking facility is on the asteroid’s far side; centrifugal force at that distance, 70,000 kilometers from Earth, amounts to just about one six-hundredth of a gravity. Ships departing the docks get a small but measurable nudge of delta-V when they release.
As her designation “APA” declared, the George Clymer was an attack transport, and she carried on board a battalion-strength MEU, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, consisting of 1,200 Marines, an aerospace strike force, heavy weapons, and vehicles, plus logistics and command elements. The Clymer’s habitation module was a fifty-meter rotating ring amidships, spinning two and a half times per minute to provide four-tenths of a gravity, roughly the same as on Mars. Singer’s office was in the ring’s outer level, right under the skin.
“HM2 Carlyle, reporting as ordered, sir.”
Singer glanced up from his holographic computer display. “Stand at ease, Doc. Hang on a sec.”
I waited as he completed whatever holowork he was doing—reports, probably, that were easier to read on an external screen than in-head. Fred Singer had
