wasn’t there before.’
‘Let me guess: a correction of half a degree.’
‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Dr Neumann?’
An hour later she was standing in Tech Central, as the smelting plants locked home in the rim.
‘What the hell is going on?’ asked Le Roque.
Hannah turned to gaze at two unused screens. Nightmarish images appeared there, but they seemed hazy now and, just for a second, she glimpsed the image of one of Argus’s steering thrusters firing up, its flame spearing out into the darkness.
Commander Liang’s cabin had been small and claustrophobic, and Clay had not wanted to stay inside it for long, but as the small Chinese man took him on a guided tour of the rest of the barracks decks, that claustrophobic feeling only increased. Squeezing past a group of soldiers gathered in the pipe of the hexagonal access tube, who were playing Yahtzee with sticky dice that they threw against a wall, and recording their scores on PDAs, he peered into the space they had abandoned. The hexagonal cabin was occupied by nine zip-up hammocks, and equipment secured to every wall made the space even smaller.
‘They get a turn in the corridor every six hours,’ remarked Liang perfunctorily. ‘Then every forty-eight hours they get an hour in the spin-gym.’
‘I guess they need it,’ Clay noted.
‘Six around each section,’ explained one of Liang’s three staff officers, pointing out the six doors ringing the tube. Clay glanced at the man and couldn’t figure out who he was. Liang had named them all earlier, but their difficult names had since slid out of Clay’s mind. Anyway, they all looked like clones of Liang. Perhaps they
Clay stepped over to an open door, peering down into the cabin below it, which was still occupied – the soldiers ensconced in their hammocks because there was nowhere else for them to go. He looked up at the door above, which was closed, then ahead along the tube to the next ring of six doors and the next group of nine men hovering outside one. These had stripped out of their VC suits and were sponging out the insides of the garments. The barracks decks resembled a honeycomb, with hexagonal cabins ringing hexagonal access tubes. The designers had obviously called on nature for the best way of packing living beings into the smallest possible space.
‘So, fifty-four troops in each separate section and four hundred and eighty-six in total along each access tube,’ Liang continued. ‘We’ve got six tubes altogether here, around which two thousand troops are bunked.’
‘That doesn’t add up,’ observed Clay.
‘They’re not all troop cabins,’ pointed out one of the clone trio accompanying them.
Clay damned himself for having made such a stupid comment. None of these living cabins had toilets or showers, so those facilities must be located somewhere. The men also needed to eat, drink and, of course, somewhere hereabouts was that ‘spin-gym’. He put his error down to how disorientating this place was, how claustrophobic. At least now he had begun to get used to the smell, which was a ripe mix of body odour, stale cooking and sewage.
‘Yeah, I can understand that,’ said Clay. ‘It must be hard for them living down here.’
‘Not as bad as you might think,’ opined Liang. ‘They have individual VR entertainment, and they have their tactical updates to learn – that stuff that was coming directly from Argus.’
These were updates which, since the Messina clones had been isolated and trapped in a hydroponics unit, hadn’t really supplied anything useful for some time now. He nodded thoughtfully, as if this was all of great interest to him, but in fact he was wondering why Liang and his staff officers bunked down here alongside the men. After all, cabins had been made available for them on the executive deck, where Clay had his own cabin. He could only surmise that Liang and his men were the utterly loyal soldier-fanatic type. He’d seen plenty like them – men who focused totally on their ‘duty’ and utterly failed to question their indoctrination.
‘They are also allowed an amount of chemical recreation,’ Liang added.
Clay knew about the various pills and potions the troops were allowed. No stimulants, however; only the kind of chemical recreation that left men and women zoned out for hours on end. Another recreation, sex, had been barred because it might lead to friction of another kind. There had been no complaints about this, since the method of prevention had been introduced into the water supply down here.
‘What about weapons drills?’ Clay asked.
‘Only in VR, at present.’
‘Yes,’ Clay nodded, ‘I take it most of the equipment is packed in the hold.’
‘It’s not that; it’s because of the lack of space.’
‘So what do we have, then, in the hold?’ Clay asked, intent on keeping the conversation running as he pushed his way past the next group of troops, even though he was already thoroughly aware of the ship’s manifest.
‘There isn’t much in the way of heavy stuff,’ said Liang. ‘We’ve got eighty vacuum-penetration locks, some spiderguns and a hundred and twenty heavy machine guns – ten mils. The rest is ammo, portable weapons, medical supplies and food.’
Just another two groups of soldiers to push their way past, and they would reach the end of this particular access tube. Then Clay wanted some excuse to get out of here fast. After spending so long in his cabin, in the crew areas of the ship, in the hold, and as much time as possible in Messina’s unfinished quarters, he had finally felt it was his duty to come here and ‘inspect the troops’. He decided now that this would be his first and last such inspection. He halted, a tingling of
