They walked into the big central space of bunks and lavatories. They hadn’t been assigned to this Barracks Ball before. It stank, of course, as all barracks did, of piss and sweat, food and disinfectant, but it didn’t smell familiar. And among the ranks of faces that peered at them, with curiosity, apathy, or hostility, there was nobody they knew.
They were assigned bunks a couple of blocks apart. Torec stroked Pirius’s back, and made her way to her own bunk. Pirius unpacked his few personal effects, and stripped out of his gaudy dress uniform, which made him feel a little better.
But he did this surrounded by staring faces. It wasn’t just the curiosity of cadets confronted by a stranger. They gazed at him as if he had two heads. They said nothing to him, and he had nothing to say to them. They snubbed him when he went to get food. Even when he lay down in the dark, he sensed the strangers around him watching him, assessing him — excluding him.
They looked so young, he thought, their faces blank, like desks empty of data. They were like children. And what was happening to him was childish, as the factions and cliques of the barracks combined to bully a new victim. It was just as Nilis had said: they might look like adults, and they would have to fight and die for mankind. But they were not long out of childhood, and every now and again it showed.
Childish it might be, but the pressure was extraordinary.
He clambered out of bed, made his way to Torec’s bunk, and crawled in beside her. They lay nested together, his belly against her back.
“We said we wouldn’t do this,” she whispered. “We have to fit in.”
“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” he replied. “Don’t throw me out.”
After a time she turned over and kissed his forehead.
In many ways she was the stronger one. But he sensed that she was as glad he was there, as he was to be there. They clung to each other, innocent as children themselves, until they fell asleep.
The next morning Captain Seath led them to a flitter. The little ship slid out of port and threaded its cautious way through the crowded sky.
Seath asked coolly, “Sleep well?”
“No, sir,” Pirius said honestly.
Torec said, “Captain, I don’t understand. Why does everybody hate us?”
“I don’t imagine they hate you.”
Pirius said, “We’re just the same as we were before.”
Seath eyed him. “No,” she said, “you’re not. You’ve done extraordinary things. You’ve seen Earth, Ensign. Even I can’t begin to imagine it. And you’ve been close to power, closer than anybody here, closer than me, closer even than the base commanders. You have changed. And you can’t change back.”
“There’s no place for us on Earth,” Pirius said.
Seath laughed. “There’s no place for you here.”
“Where, then?” Torec asked.
“Why, nowhere.” She shrugged. “It’s not your fault. It’s just the way of things. The only people who understand you are each other — and each other is all you will ever have. You’ll just have to get on with it.”
As she said that, Pirius felt Torec moving subtly away from him. He sensed a return of her old resentment: they had come all the way back to Arches, and she still couldn’t get away from him.
The base for Nilis’s pet squadron was just another rock among the hurtling asteroids of Arches. Known only as Rock 492, it was a kilometer-wide lump of debris. On its battered surface was a cluster of buildings of bubble-blown rock, and a few broad pits that had once been landing pads and dry docks. But all this was long abandoned.
They had to climb out of the flitter in their skinsuits.
The buildings, long stripped of anything usable, were so old their surviving walls were pocked with micrometeorite craters, and a thin silt of dust had gathered around the bases of their walls. Some of their domes had cracked open altogether.
Only one of the buildings was airtight to regulation standard. When they clambered inside, through a temporary airlock hastily patched into a hole in the wall, they found themselves in a cavernous hollow. Bots crawled over the floor and roof, patching up defects. But even the bots looked old and worn out, and the engineers who supervised them weren’t much better. There was no gravity in here — or rather, only the micro-gravity of the asteroid, just a feather touch — and the light, cast by a few hovering globes, was misty, the air a shining silver-gray.
Pirius cracked his faceplate and took a deep breath. The air was stale, so lacking in oxygen his chest ached, and it stank of oil and metal, and of the burning smell of raw asteroid dust, oxidizing busily. As the irritating dust got to work on his sinuses he started to sneeze.
“Lethe,” he said. “Is this it?”
“Nothing works but the inertial deflectors,” Torec said. That had to be true, or else the whole Rock, plummeting through the complicated geometry of Arches, would have been a hazard. She sighed. “Don’t they realize we are trying to save the Galaxy? How are we supposed to do that if the toilets don’t work?”
But there was nothing to be done about the strange internal politics of Arches, the Navy, the Coalition, and humankind in general. So they got to work.
For the next few days they wrestled with ancient air and water cyclers, balky nano-food systems, and hovering light globes that wouldn’t stay still. Even the machines didn’t seem to like them: they resisted being fixed, and developed faults and quirks that simply seemed perverse. Their social life didn’t get any better, either. If they had been outsiders in the Barracks Ball, they were definitely not wanted here, by engineers who clearly believed they had better things to do than labor over a lump of shit like Rock 492.
But in another way it was fun, Pirius thought. Getting immersed in the guts of a broken pump or a clogged air-filter system was dirty, hard work, but it was a job that was finite and understandable and something you could finish, unlike the diffuse politicking of Earth.
The systems came online one by one. As they heard the laboring of air pumps, and felt the shuddering of water pumping through the pipes, the place started to seem alive. And because they had worked so hard over it, Pirius and Torec thought of it as theirs. Before he had gone to Earth, the only homes Pirius had ever known had been one Barracks Ball after another. Now Rock 492 was starting to feel like home — though he and Torec only dared discuss such thoroughly non-Doctrinal matters in whispers, and they would never have mentioned it to Captain Seath.
The ensigns were summoned to regular meetings with Nilis.
These were always held in the Commissary’s room in Officer Country. Even though he had assimilated the experiences of his avatar Virtual who had ridden with Pirius Blue through the Cavity, Nilis seemed as scared of Arches’ daunting sky now as when he had first come here, and he tended to hide in his room. But he had quickly made this faceless little cabin his own, spreading his clutter of data desks, clothes and bric-a-brac over every surface, and filling the air with clustering Virtuals. Torec said he made every place he stayed into a nest, as rats made nests. Pirius thought a little wistfully of what it must mean to have a real home, and to miss it, as Nilis clearly missed his.
Torec complained about the state of Rock 492. Nilis said there was nothing he could do about it for now, they would have to wait for a meeting he had scheduled with Marshal Kimmer, the senior Navy officer on the base. After this “showdown,” as Nilis called it, he was sure their requests would be properly met, as the oversight committee had mandated.
Pirius wasn’t so sure. He knew that officers like Marshal Kimmer tended to regard their bases as their private domains. He wouldn’t take kindly to what he would surely see as interference from out- of-touch bureaucrats on far-off Earth, no matter what their formal authority.