7.0

He was staring at a plate. The old-fashioned kind: round, and without dividers, and made of baked soil. The sort of plate that smashed into a dozen pieces when Earth women hurled them at their husbands in the black-and-white movies. This plate wasn’t black-and-white, though. It was ornate, and beautiful, and full of color. Blue, and yellow, and cursive black in an interlocking pattern that looked like molecules.

The pattern began to disappear. Slowly at first, then ever faster under tendrils of green mold that spread across the surface until all that was left of the plate beneath was its shape. And soon, not even that. The mold kept growing. Thicker and higher, and thicker and higher, until it was reaching for his face and forcing his mouth apart and putting roots through his tongue.

He was choking. But not from the mold. From something in his throat. Something hard. And round. And almost alive.

He coughed it up.

BozBall. Red now, with gold accents. It arced through the air and landed in a veined sea of green. The green closed around it, swallowing it from sight.

There was screaming.

Ravi wasn’t sure if the screaming was part of the dream or something he’d actually done. It felt like someone had taken a chainsaw to his skull. He could barely move his head, it hurt so much.

“Lights,” he ordered. The voice that reached his ears was light and frail. It scratched at his throat on the way out. The lights burst on, hurting his eyes. Still squinting, he swung his legs out of his bunk and onto the scuffed carpet that covered the deck plates. It took real, physical courage just to stand up. His head exploded in a starry constellation of pain.

“Archie’s hooks,” he muttered. And then, more firmly: “This has got to stop.”

Still not up to the trauma of using his implants, he used voice commands to call in sick and then, of course, immediately felt better. Still, he’d done it now. Better follow through.

Ecuador’s infirmary was several decks up on the other side of the wheel, so it took him a while to get there. He winced as he authorized a ten-liter deduction from his tank and watched the insides of his eyelids flash red: the purser’s way of warning him he was down to subsistence. It was only a couple of sols to payday, he reminded himself. He wouldn’t go thirsty for long.

“Hop up here while I plug you in,” the medic suggested, with absent-minded kindness. He exuded a gray gentleness, born of many years on the job. Crow’s-feet danced happily around his eyes.

Ravi did as instructed. He sat on the worn examination table while the medic slotted a jack into the small port at the base of his skull.

The medic’s expression took on the slightly blank look of someone reading a data stream.

“So,” he asked. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Headaches.”

A soft sound escaped from the medic’s lips. Meaningless and noncommittal.

“How often?”

“Every sol, it seems like.”

The soft sound again.

“And how long has this been going on?”

“A few sols, I guess.”

“Anything like this ever happen to you before?”

Ravi shook his head. He half-expected it to hurt.

“Banged your head at all, anything like that?”

Ravi shook his head again.

The doctor’s eyes regained their focus. He blessed Ravi with a brief smile.

“I’m not seeing anything very wrong,” he said reassuringly. The smile faded away. “You do have a bit of inflammation around your implants, though. When did you last have them serviced?”

“Year end.”

The medic’s eyes traveled to the insignia on Ravi’s collar.

“Trainee, I see?”

Ravi nodded.

“Engineering?”

“Yes.”

“Tough discipline. Very tough.”

The doctor flashed over a prescription.

“You’ve been working too hard,” he said confidently. “Lean forward, please.” He removed the jack from the base of Ravi’s skull. “All those files. All that processing. All those tests.” He shook his head ruefully, as if remembering his own time of trial. “Enough to stress anyone’s cybernetics.” He unscrewed the jack with a gloved hand and dropped it in a receptacle for cleaning. “The brain’s a very plastic organ, Middy. It’s constantly rewiring itself, which is why your implants have adaptive connectors: so they can keep up. But stress the brain, make it learn new things constantly, and that rewiring goes into overdrive, particularly at night, when the brain is busy cleaning itself out. The connectors can’t keep up, and you get microlesions and all sorts of inflammation around the interface, which is what you’ve got here.

“I’ve given you a prescription for CerebroLaxin. Once a sol, just before bedtime with food.” He leaned forward, staring intently into Ravi’s eyes to make sure he understood. “Always before bedtime,” he emphasized. “The damage is done at night, remember. When you dream.”

Prescription in pocket, Ravi had intended to head back to his quarters to study, and maybe download a movie. But as he headed along Columbus Circular, past Third Gen murals of a Homeworld none of the artists had ever seen, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl. More specifically, he couldn’t stop thinking of an idea about the girl. That the idea was criminal and exactly the sort of thing his father would have done gnawed at his conscience. But not enough to make it go away.

It’s only a crime if you get caught, son. Which you won’t.

He caught an elevator to the hubs and kicked off across the cavernous void. Instead of heading “up,” which would have taken him in the general direction of Denmark and the forward habitat wheels, Ravi’s lazy trajectory took him in the opposite direction. As he sailed past the gaping maws of the Fiji spokes, the wide, cylindrical walls that held them in place became scarred and pitted. Black stains from a long-ago inferno painted the surface in a memory of violence. And, as it always did when he came this way, his heart fluttered a little with anxiety. It was all too easy to imagine the meteoroid ripping through the ship’s hull in a cacophony of molten metal and decompression. A quarter of the crew had lost their lives, he knew, victims and heroes both. The victims had barely known what hit them. The heroes had saved the ship. But it had been a close-run thing.

Even now, three generations later, Ravi was convinced he could smell burning. When he’d confided this to Ansimov once, Ansimov’s reaction had been swift—and unsympathetic. He’d never mentioned it again.

While the smell of burning might have been the product of an overactive imagination, the groaning in his ears was not—a stertorous, metallic creak that waxed and waned like the wheezing of some asthmatic giant.

The Ghana hub: its buckled bearings grinding around and around in reluctant rotation. Ravi landed on it with surprising precision, only a few dozen meters from the twelve o’clock spoke. He gave himself a mental pat on the back. Landing on Ghana with any kind of accuracy was tough to judge. It turned so much slower than the others.

Ravi glanced farther aft, to where the hubs closed in on themselves in a brightly lit, complicated mess of platforms and cages and airlocks: stopping-off points for the various elevators that ran out along the ship’s spine. Posses of dock workers were floating from one cage to another, wrangling bulging nets of weightless cargo, though whether coming or going was impossible to tell.

There was so much going on, he could almost ignore the cold darkness he’d have to cross to get there.

Creaking or not, Ghana still turned. Hungary had died in the disaster. The unlit hub of Ghana’s once-twin was frozen eerily in place, the wide mouths of its spokes gagged with plating. The plating, Ravi knew, was freezing to the touch. The vacuum on the other side was colder still. Or perhaps it was cold for other reasons. Hungary, they said, was full of ghosts. If a person were brave enough to wander its hub in the dead of the night-cycle, so the story went, they might still hear the screams of the dying crew.

Ravi grabbed hold of one of Ghana’s rickety paternosters and headed into the wheel. Even as the deck numbers headed into the teens, he hardly bothered to hold on. Gravity at Ghana’s outer rim, below deck thirty, was barely a third of a g. Up here, it scarcely registered. He stepped off the paternoster as lightly as possible. He had no desire to fly headfirst into the ceiling.

The circulars here were a dull gray and devoid of decoration, the walls a patchwork of hasty repairs no one had bothered to tidy up. Once-working doors had been welded shut, and most of the minor passageways were closed off with grating. The whole space echoed to the groans and creaks of the wheel’s hub, its circular agonies now far above his head. Ravi loped along in the sort of skipping motion that works best in low g, covering meters with every stride. If the ceilings had been just a fraction higher, it would have been fun.

The circular dead-ended in a large double door. Slightly buckled, it opened with reluctance. Once through, Ravi found himself on a catwalk that stretched across the top of a huge warehouse, maybe two decks deep and almost as wide as the wheel itself. A small army of machines hummed along between rack after rack of  . . . stuff, mostly crated and numbered, moving it from one place to another. A small number of human beings kept an eye on them.

The catwalk’s guardrail was so flimsy, it was little more than decoration. Ravi leaned over it and waved.

“Boz!” he cried out. “Boz!”

Boz looked up in surprise. Although she was looking in his general direction, it was as if she couldn’t make him out. Which was almost certainly true, Ravi realized. She would be half-blinded by a scrolling stream of manifests and schedules.

“Over here! Eleven o’clock high.”

Boz’s face cracked into a smile.

“Gotcha. Hang on a minute while I log out.”

She jumped up to meet him. Literally. Ravi had been expecting her to find the nearest set of steps, but she didn’t bother. Ravi had to admire her eye. Ghana might not be spinning quickly, but it was still spinning. And the closer to the rim a person got, the more quickly it spun. Moving from the faster warehouse floor to the slower catwalk in one graceful leap was not straightforward. Boz managed it anyway, landing softly on the outside of the guardrail and swinging herself over in an easy, well-practiced movement.

“So,” she asked, grinning. “What’s up?”

“Can you hack the crew personnel files?”

Boz’s grin vanished. She grabbed Ravi by the elbow, marched him back down the catwalk and out onto the circular. Only when the doors closed shut behind them did she bother to speak.

“Archie’s hooks, Ravi! Are you trying to get me recycled?” Her eyes blazed with anger. “You know I’m on probation, right? That I’m, like, monitored at work?”

Even in super-low g, Ravi could feel the blood draining from his face.

“Oh, sard. I’m sorry, Boz. I wasn’t thinking.”

A faint smile quirked at his cousin’s lips.

“No,” she said drily. “You weren’t.” She poked him lightly in the chest. “You’re lucky I’m not your dad, because right about now, I’d be giving you a smack.”

Ravi grimaced. He could almost feel the cuff on the back of his head.

Boz leaned against a scarred patch of bulkhead and fished out a cigarette.

“And luckily for the both of us, they’re not hooked into my eyes and ears right now.” She allowed herself a look of mild distaste. “Once they know I’ve turned up, they generally leave me alone. Proves I’m not . . . Dead Weight.”

Boz looked suddenly uncomfortable. She brushed the words away with a visible effort and moved on.

“You have a, ah, project for me?”

Ravi nodded.

“When are you done here?” he asked.

“Half an hour. Or as long as it takes me to get a thousand liters of soymilk nobody can find and route it to Canada. After that”—she gave the side of her head a knowing tap—“I’m, like, totally free.” Her eyes were alive with curiosity. “I’ll meet you in the Fiji bolt-hole. Don’t trip the booby traps.”

The missing Canadian soymilk couldn’t have presented Boz with much of a challenge. She reached the abandoned control room high up in Fiji less than twenty minutes after he did.

“Don’t talk” were the first words out of her mouth. Followed by “Let’s have a look at your chips.”

Ravi opened his mouth to protest and then thought better of it. With a certain amount of trepidation, he flashed her a key.

“Ow!” His hands flew to the stabbing pain in his temples.

“Oops. Sorry about that.” To Ravi’s way of thinking, Boz didn’t sound nearly sorry enough. He grabbed on to a stripped-down console to keep from collapsing. Alternating waves of lightheadedness and nausea washed across his head.

“Will you hurry up?”

“Almost done.” The unsettling sensation disappeared. “Your code is a bescumbered mess, you know that?” His cousin wiped a bead of sweat from her brow. “Who services your software?”

“Geppert and Johnson.”

“The shop in Bermuda-nine? You can afford that?”

“Mom pays,” Ravi admitted, uncomfortably. “A present for making it to the training program. Said she wanted me to have the best. Like my classmates.”

“I’m not sure ‘the best’ is how I’d describe the inside of your head right now. A LOKI cyber-warrior would have left less of a bootprint. On the plus side, I can confirm there are no ShipSec tracers in there. You are completely clean.”

Ravi refrained from pointing out that ShipSec tracers were for criminals and scofflaws. Like Boz.

“And yours?” he asked delicately.

“Fast asleep.” Her voice dropped to a prideful whisper. “I hacked them months ago. If they wake up, I’ll know it. Not that they will.” She walked across to the burned-out remains of a chair and slid into it. “My head’s my own until curfew. Even scofflaws are entitled to their privacy.” Bolted to the deck, the chair swiveled with a reluctant squeak. Boz forced it through a complete 360 before she spoke again.

“You really want into the personnel files?”

Ravi nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“Why?”

Ravi’s hands started to shake. Officer or MacLeod? asked the little voice in his head. Officer or MacLeod? The shaking wouldn’t stop. He stuffed his hands as deep in his pockets as they would go. The bottle of CerebroLaxin pressed against his fingertips.

“It’s the girl. I need to know if she’s real.”

Boz’s only answer was a raised eyebrow.

“If she’s real, she’s on the ship,” Ravi explained in a rush. “And if she’s on the ship, she has a file. Find the file, find the girl.”

“And if she’s not real?”

Ravi gave a resigned shrug of the shoulders. His fingers curled around the cool plastic of his prescription.

“Then I’ve got bigger problems.”