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  “I know that, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I . . . no excuse, sir.”

  “On board ship, our patients tend to be young and very, very healthy. Oh, you’ll get the occasional case of appendicitis or a sprained ankle or even a cold, but when one comes to you with vague symptoms like that, you need to consider the possibility that he did something to himself.

  “Because our patients on board ship also tend to be very bored. They tend to be good at figuring out ways to subvert the system and apply technology to alleviate that boredom.”

  I thought about Doobie and his lab-brewed hooch. “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s especially true if he comes to you asking for a dose of nanomeds. Every technology can be misused in one way or another. It’s ridiculously easy for these kids to go on liberty and buy a handheld unit that can program ’bots to do damned near anything, just about. Onans are probably the most common. But they have them for programming a heroin rush, which is pretty much the same thing. Or cocaine. Or even, believe it or not, the feeling of contentment after a good meal.”

  “Is that addictive, Doctor?”

  “Can be. I saw one young enlisted woman a few years ago who was anorexic. She used an N-prog to feel full, like she’d just had a good meal, and stopped eating. We almost didn’t save her.”

  “That’s just nuts, sir.”

  “No, it’s just human. Humans do stupid things, or humans get screwed up in the head and that makes them to do stupid things.”

  “Yes, sir.” I hesitated. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “I’m curious about Howell, sir. If he programmed the ’bots in his system to stimulate dopamine production . . . that’s just the craving, isn’t it? How did that cause the muscle spasms? And why did he go into convulsions? I didn’t give him any nanomeds this morning. Just aspirin.”

  “Hm.” For a moment, he got a faraway look in his eyes, as though he were listening to something. “Do you know the term synaptic plasticity?”

  “No, sir. I know what a synapse is.”

  “The gap between one nerve cell and the next, yes. Synaptic plasticity is the tendency of the connection across the synapses to change in strength, either with use or with disuse. Among other things, it means the ability to change the quantity of neurotransmitters released into a synapse, and how well the next neuron in the chain responds to them. It’s an important factor in learning.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Aspirin can affect synaptic plasticity. One of aspirin’s metabolic by-products, salicylate, acts on the NMDA receptors in cells, and that affects the flow of calcium ions across a neural synapse.”

  At this point, Dr. Francis was way over my head. I had absolutely no idea what an NMDA receptor might be.

  He must have sensed my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. My guess is Howell had a resident population of nanobots in his brain, programmed to give him an orgasm anytime he wanted, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. One of the characteristics of neurotransmitters is you get a weakening effect each time you fire them.” He waved his hand in a descending series of peaks to illustrate. “You get this much of a jolt, then a little less, and a little less, like this. In an addiction, you need to boost the dosage of your drug of choice to get the same bang for your buck, right?”

  “Yes, sir.” This was more familiar territory.

  “Well, the same thing happens with dopamine. He might even have been going into withdrawal. Dopamine affects the same parts of the limbic system that heroin and cocaine hits.”

  “Yeah. Headache. Runny nose. General aches and pains.”

  “Symptoms like the flu,” Francis said. “Exactly. So he came to you to get you to prescribe a shot of nano, with the idea that more is better. He could reprogram what you gave him . . . or it looks like the nanobots he already had were set to reprogram anything new. You gave him aspirin instead. Maybe he took them back to the berthing compartment and downed them all, just hoping something would happen. The full chem workup we pulled on him this afternoon showed elevated salicylate levels.

  “He might have boosted the programming on his nanobots, too. Upped the power, and maybe set them to deliberately give him an hour of multiple orgasms. We’ll know that if we find his N-prog in his locker. One way or another, though, the aspirin increased the efficiency of neurotransmitter uptake—specifically of dopamine. It also might have increased the triggering receptivity of his muscles. Aspirin is a decent muscle relaxant.”

  The realization of what he was saying had just hit me, bam. “You’re saying I . . . I poisoned Howell, sir. I gave him that aspirin, and that’s what triggered the convulsions.”

  “Not at all. I’m saying that when you’re working with these people, you need to be suspicious. Paranoid, even. What are they trying to put over on you?” He scowled. “It’s ridiculous. Most of them have fuck buddies in the squad bay, for God’s sake. Virtual reality feeds from the ship’s library let them have sex in their heads with all the hottest erotic stars on the Net. And still they screw with illegal nano programmers, trying to get a bigger kick, or they o-loop them to get a whole lot of them in a row.

  “What happened wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know he was doing an onan, or that he was o-looping. But, damn it, be suspicious! If they’re showing fuzzy symptoms, or symptoms that don’t really make sense, do a scan and check for resident nano! If Howell had access to the stuff, it’s a sure bet that a dozen others on the Clymer are using, too. I’m going to need to take this to the skipper.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh . . .”

  “What?”

  “What about me, sir? Am I on report?”

  “Why would you be on report?”

  “I screwed up. I missed the nano, I didn’t think of addiction when I saw him at sick call this morning, and I gave him enough aspirin to trigger those convulsions.”

  Francis sighed. He raised his hand and began ticking points off on his fingers. “One, you didn’t ‘screw up.’ You could have been a little more persistent, a little more observant. But his symptoms looked like a clear call. The flu.

  “Two. You’re not a doctor, nor do you have training in neurophysiology. At sick call, you screen the patients so that I don’t have to see all of them, and sort out the malingerers from the ones who are really sick. You’re trained to handle routine stuff. Colds and STDs and stubbed toes. Nanogenic dopamine addictive response is not routine.

  “Three. One of the most complicated and difficult aspects of medicine is understanding how drugs or nano programs can interact or interfere with one another. It’s amazing how complicated things can get, with different drugs either reinforcing one another, or cancelling each other out—and with illegal nano, all bets are off!

  “Four. Aspirin has been around since the late nineteenth century, unless you count shamans prescribing willow bark for pain, which is where the stuff came from. We’ve understood in general how it works since the late twentieth. But, believe me, even something that’s been around as long as aspirin can still surprise you. People have unusual sensitivities, or allergies, or they’re on drugs or nano treatments, or they’re shooting themselves full of crap that could kill them.

  “And no one can keep up with all of the possibilities. That’s why we have expert systems, AIs with medical databases that let them guide us through the jungle of drug interactions. When in doubt, use them.”

  I sagged a bit inside. “I do, when there’s a question,” I said. “But I didn’t have a question this time. I really thought Howell had a cold.”

  “It happens to all of us, Carlyle. We make mistakes, we’re not perfect. Things could have turned out a lot worse for Private Howell, believe me. They didn’t. So . . . you made a mistake. Learn from it. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Questi
ons?”

  “Just . . . is this going to affect my FMF training?”

  “Hell, no. You’re a good Corpsman, and I want you on my team. So as far as I’m concerned, you’re in.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You want liberty tonight?”

  I thought about it. Right then, I really wanted to get off the ship. There was this bar in Supra-Cayambe I really liked: the Earthview.

  “Yes, sir. If that’s okay . . .”

  “Absolutely. Give me your hand.”

  I extended my left hand, and he passed a wand over it. All military personnel have a programmable chip implanted in their left wrist and another in the back of their head. They serve as ID—what the military used to call dog tags—and can also carry orders and authorizations. My CDF in-head hardware—my Cerebral Data Feed implants—could also carry orders, of course, but the Navy takes a dim view of enlisted personnel writing or rewriting their own.

  What Dr. Francis had just done was give me an authorization, signed by him, my department head, to leave the ship for twelve hours, what both the Navy and the Marine Corps refer to as liberty.

  I was free for the evening, unless, of course, we had an emergency recall.

  “Have you heard anything about when we’re shipping out again, sir?” I asked.

  “Not a word. I wouldn’t worry about it. If they’re putting together an out-system expeditionary force, it’s going to take them a while to assemble all the ships. So enjoy your time ashore.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Dismissed.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  As an ass-chewing, Dr. Francis’s lecture wasn’t bad at all. In fact, I think he was trying to encourage me. But the talk hadn’t made me feel better. If anything, I felt worse.

  “Hey, e-Car! You going ashore?”

  It was Dubois. I’d just walked into the squad bay, on my way to my compartment to change into civvies.

  “I guess so,” I told him. “I need a drink, or ten.”

  “Yeah. Francis chewed you a new one, huh?”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “It’s all over the ship, you know, that he had you on the carpet for dropping the ball with Howell.”

  “Great,” I told him. “Exactly what I needed to hear.”

  I was really looking forward to that drink.

  Chapter Four

  The Earthview Lounge is located at the top of the Cayambe Space Elevator, and the place is well named. The view from up there is spectacular.

  The Space Elevator went into operation in 2095, a 71,000-kilometer-high woven buckycarb tether stretching from Earthport, atop the third-highest mountain in Ecuador, all the way up to Starport. The other two elevators, at Mount Kenya and Pulau Lingga/Singapore, came on-line later, but Cayambe was the first. A cartel of banking and space-industry businesses built the elevator, and it was run as an international megacorporation until the Commonwealth officially took it over in 2115.

  Halfway up, just below the 36,000-kilometer level, is the Geosynch Center, which is a major node of communications and industrial facilities clustered around the elevator, both in free orbit and attached to the cable. It’s also the location of the big solar reflector arrays. Starport, however, is all the way up at the top, built into and around the surface of the five-kilometer asteroid used to anchor the elevator and keep it stretched out taut—a stone tied to the end of a whirling string. Ships launching from Starport picked up a small but free boost from the centrifugal force of the elevator’s once-per-day rotation.

  I went ashore with Doob and HM3 Charlie “Machine” McKean, flashing our electronic passes at the AI of the watch and riding the transparent docking tube from Clymer’s quarterdeck up to the planetoid in a transport capsule.

  It was quite a view. The George Clymer was nestled into the space dock facility on the planetoid’s far side, the location of Starport’s Commonwealth naval base. A dozen other ships were there as well, including the assault carrier Lewis B. Puller, three times the Clymer’s length, ten times her mass, and carrying four squadrons of A/S-60 and A/S-104 Marine planetary assault fighters, plus numerous reconnaissance and support spacecraft. There were civilian ships as well, including a couple of deep interstellar research vessels, the Stephen Hawking and the Edward Witten.

  Most of the Starport planetoid is in microgravity. The rock itself doesn’t have enough mass for more than a whisper of gravity of its own, and this far out from Earth, the centrifugal force created by its rotation amounts to about 0.0017 of a G.

  That means that if you drop a wineglass, after the first second it’s fallen one and a half centimeters—a smitch more than half an inch—and there’s plenty of time to catch it before it hits the deck.

  But, of course, you don’t want to be drinking out of a wineglass in the first place. Things still have their normal mass in microgravity, if not their weight, and once the wine gets to swirling in the glass it will keep moving up and out and all over you and the deck in shimmying slow-motion spheres.

  Which was why we were headed for the Starport Nearside Complex, the small space city constructed on the Earth-facing side of the planetoid, better known as the Wheel. It’s a kilometer-wide wheel encircling the up-tether from Earth, and rotating once a minute to create an out-is-down spin gravity of about half a G.

  We caught the thru-tube that whisked us from the Starport Terminal through the core of the planetoid and deposited us at the hub of Wheel City. From there, we floated our way into the rotating entryway and rose through one of the spokes, the sensation of gravity steadily increasing as we rose farther out from the hub.

  The Wheel holds the heart of the Commonwealth Starport Naval Base, including the headquarters and communications center, support facilities, and a Marine training module, but over half of the huge structure is civilian territory, a free port administered directly by the Commonwealth. The Earthview was a bar-restaurant combo located in one of the Wheel segments, and it came by its name honestly.

  The entryway checked our passes as we walked in. One entire wall, from floor to ceiling, was a viewall looking down-tether at Earth.

  The disk appeared about thirty times larger than a full moon from Earth, a dazzlingly brilliant swirl of azure seas and intensely white clouds and polar caps. The planet was in half-phase at the moment, with the sunset terminator passing through Ecuador and down the South American spine of the Andes Mountains. It was late summer in the northern hemisphere, so the terminator ran almost straight north up the Atlantic seaboard. South, the bulge of Brazil was picked out by the massed city lights of the megapolis stretching from Montevideo to Belém.

  North, of course, the New Ice Age still held northern New England and much of Canada in a midwinter’s death’s grip, despite all the efforts of the mirror array at Geosynch. The Canadian ice sheets, especially, were blinding in the afternoon sunlight.

  At the moment, the viewall image was coming through an external camera somewhere on the planetoid; the Earth and the starfield behind it weren’t rotating with the Wheel’s stately spin. I could see one of the elevator capsules on its way up-tether, gleaming bright silver in the sunlight.

  “You been here before, e-Car?” Machine asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I admitted. “I like the view.”

  Doob cackled a nasty laugh. “View is right! The girls here are spectacular!”

  Which wasn’t what I meant, of course, but, hey, when the man’s right, he’s right. The Earthview was actually divided into halves, separated by a soundproof bulkhead. The side reserved for civilians was rather genteel, I’d heard—fine dining at exorbitant prices, the food delivered by robotic waitstaff indistinguishable from FAB (flesh and blood). They even served real beef there, shipped up-tether for the financial equivalent of two arms, a leg, and the promised delivery of your firstborn.

  The Earthview Lounge next door, howev
er, was a bit . . . livelier. Naked FAB waitresses, live sex shows on the black, fur-padded central stage, and throbbing, full-sensory music fed directly through the patrons’ implants and going straight to those parts of the brain responsible for hearing and feeling. And the girls were gorgeous, ranging from exotic genies to BTL sexbots to winsome girl-next-door types. The joint wasn’t reserved for the military, not officially, anyway, but I doubt that most civilians were all that comfortable there. The fleet was in, and enlisted personnel tended to get a bit territorial with their liberty hot spots.

  Doob and Machine and I let the door deduct the cover charge from our eccounts and we wandered in, looking for good seats. An enthusiastic ménage-à-quatre was writhing away on the stage, backlit by the half-full Earth, and the place was flooded with blue-silver earthlight. A hostess wearing a plastic smile and some luminous animated tattoos showed us to a table close to the entertainment and took our drink orders. The mood music, a piece I half recognized by Apokyleptos, literally felt like hands running over my body; the audible part was too damned loud, but I dialed my reception down a bit and it was okay after that.

  A waitress brought us our drinks and one of those smiles, and we leaned back in the chairs to enjoy the show. I’d ordered a hyperbolic trajectory—vodka, white rum, metafuel, and blue incandescence. I tossed it back, shuddered through the burn, and after that I didn’t care quite so much about screwing up with Howell. After my second glass, I didn’t care at all about Howell, and after the third I didn’t care much about anything.

  “So I hear you didn’t get booted from the program,” Machine said. “Lucky.”

  “I guess,” I said, but without much enthusiasm. “I’ve been having second thoughts, y’know?”

  “What, about going FMF?” Doob asked. “Shit, every Corpsman wants to go FMF! Best of the best, right?”

  “S’okay,” I said, shrugging, “if you like jarheads.” My lips felt numb and I was having some trouble shaping the words.

  “Don’t you?” McKean asked.

  “Sure, when the bastards aren’t trying to put something over on you.” I was still feeling burned by Howell’s attempt to get another shot of nano.