0950 hours ST (Shipboard Time)
Strange thoughts and images flooded Garroway’s brain. I thought we weren’t supposed to dream, he thought, struggling against a thick, hot, and oppressive sense of drowning. He’d been falling … falling … falling among myriad stars toward a dazzling red beacon at the bottom of an infinitely deep well. The beacon was growing brighter with each passing moment, but somehow he never seemed to reach it. …
The strangling sensation grew sharper, and then he was awake, coughing and gasping, struggling to clear his lungs of a viscous jelly plugging nose and mouth and windpipe. He gave a final convulsive cough and hit his head against the roof of his cell. It took him a few moments to connect with where he was. His last memories were of the processing center at Seven Palms, of being led into a cavernous room with perhaps half of his graduating boot company, of being ordered to remove all clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments and log them in with a clerk, of lying down on a thin mattress on a hard, narrow metal slab that made him think about morgues and autopsies. A voice had been talking to him through his implant, having him count backward from one hundred. And then …
His arm burned slightly, and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”
He was aware now of more and more sensations, of a growing light in his sleep cell, of the feeling of weakness pervading every muscle of his body, of the warm and wet stickiness of some kind of gel melting beneath his hips and back, of ravenous hunger in the pit of his belly, of the incredible stink filling the coffin-sized compartment. Goddess, what kind of hell was he awakening to?
Struggling against a paralyzing weakness, he managed to roll onto his left elbow and found he could breathe a bit more easily than he could while flat on his back. His shrunken stomach rebelled then and he tried to vomit, but his retching produced only more of the all-pervasive jelly, a kind of translucent slime mingled with white foam.
Abruptly, the end of his sleep cell cracked open with a sharp hiss, and his pallet slid partway out into the hab compartment. After the claustrophobic confines of the cell, the open space of the hab deck was dizzying.
Two Marines in utility fatigues, a man and a woman, peered down at him. “How ya doin’, Mac?” the woman asked him. “What’s your name?”
“Garroway,” he replied automatically. “John. Recruit private, serial number 19283-336—”
“He checks,” the man said. “He’s tracking.”
The woman patted his shoulder. “Hang in there, Marine. Welcome to 2148.”
The two moved away then, edging along a walkway hugging the face of the hab module bulkhead to the next open sleep cell in line.
Garroway tried to make sense of the confused thoughts clogging a brain that simply wasn’t working yet. What, he wondered, had gone wrong? They’d all been told that there’d been a change of plan, that they were to enter cybehibe while still on the ground. The compartment looked like the interior of a fairly large hab module. Was he still on Earth? Or was he on the transport, and something had gone wrong while putting him under?
No … no, one of the Marines had said something … had it been Welcome to 2148?
Realization washed over him, leaving him feeling cold and dizzy. Somehow, in the time between when he’d been counting backward on that pallet in Seven Palms and now, ten years had slipped away. He sagged back down on his pallet, working to assimilate that one small bit of overwhelming information.
Ten years. What had happened during that time to his mother … to Lynnley … to Earth herself?
And did that mean …
Urgently, he thought-clicked, opening his cerebral implant. The link must be working; he’d heard a voice a few moments ago telling him to stay put.
“Link,” he thought. “Query. Navigational data.”
“Please wait,” the voice said in his mind. “The system is busy.”
Well, that made sense. If a whole transport-load of Marines was waking up around him, they must be accessing the onboard AI pretty heavily. Even a shipboard intelligence like the one running the Derna would have a bit of trouble processing twelve hundred simultaneous requests for data.
He waited for nearly five minutes by his internal clock before the voice said, “Navigational data now open, Private. This is Cassius speaking.”
“Cassius. Did we make it?” he asked aloud. “Are we at Llalande?”
“The Derna crossed the arbitrary astronomical delineation of the Llalande 21185 system 2,200 hours ago,” the voice told him, “and is currently slightly less than twelve million kilometers from the objective world of Ishtar.”
A diagram unfolded within his mind, showing the MIEU’s inbound course as a blue line drawing itself across the black backdrop of space. Llalande 21185 was a bright red point of light along the way, and Garroway thought he knew now where the half-forgotten dream imagery of a red beacon had come from. He saw how the Derna and her consorts had already looped past giant Marduk and were falling now back toward the miniature solar system that was Marduk and its whirling collection of moons. Snatches of alphanumerics floating next to the ship symbols showed the flotilla’s velocity and delta V.
“How come I was able to see that red star in my dreams?” he asked, suddenly curious.
“The human mind seems designed to extract information from its surroundings, no matter what the circumstances,” Cassius replied. “A number of Marines in the MIEU have reported dream imagery that appears to have leaked across the data interface with the ship navigational AI. This does not appear to represent a problem or a fault in the nanoimplant hardware. Is there another question?”
“How—How long until we debark?”
“H-hour for the main assault group has yet to be determined. The special assault task force code-named Dragon will be debarking in twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes. Debarkation of the main force will depend at least partly on the success of the special task force. Is there another question?”
“Uh … I guess not.” He felt the connection in his head go empty.
He knew he’d been assigned to TF Dragon. They’d told him as much during his final briefing on Earth. But he didn’t know anything about the mission or what was expected of him, didn’t know most of these people, didn’t even know who his commanding officer was.
He felt very much alone, very much lost.
“Those of you who can move, shake a leg!” someone bellowed from the deck below. “C’mon, you squirrels! Out of your trees! That’s reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!”
The familiar litany galvanized Garroway into movement. He still felt sluggish, and every muscle in his body ached, but he was able to sit up on his pallet, sling his legs over the side, and find the nearest set of rungs set into the bulkhead, allowing him to shakily climb down to the deck.
Dozens of Marines were already there, talking, standing, sitting, exercising in a tangled press of nude bodies. A line had already formed in front of the shower cell, a passageway in the bulkhead leading through to the shower head and dry compartment and back out again to the main deck. Others were gathering in front of the chow dispensers, accepting with grumbling ill grace the squeeze tubes of lightly flavored paste that would be their food for the next several days, until their digestive systems got used to the sensations of dealing with real food once more.
Garroway wrestled for a moment with the choice … clean or food? His body was coated with a thin, slick film of mingled sweat and the residue from the support gel he’d been lying in for the past decade, and he felt as though he were choking on his own stink. But at the same time his stomach was twisting and growling in spite of the punishment it had just taken. Food, he thought