Hegemony

by Kalina, Mark

  This was it! This was the fate she had wanted. Nothing mass-pre-fabricated here, or at least nothing that looked like it. No less than the surroundings, the people at the lounge were amazing to Zandy. They were dressed in the latest fashions, sleek and smooth like the surroundings. They talked or sat silently, plugged into direct interface data feeds.

  Some were probably aristokratai, Zandy thought, but it was hard to pick them out, unless most of the young, fit looking people here were aristokratai. She didn't think so, but there was almost no way to tell for most of them. Some people, old looking, or out of shape, were obviously demoi, but even those, commoners like her, were such a far cry from the residence zones, dressed in sharp-looking clothing, using direct interface implants. It occurred to Zandy that she would be getting an implant; brain surgery! That was scary, and the stim-drink was amping up the fear. She forced the worry down again.

  And a few of the people here were definitely, unmistakably, aristokratai. She could see two slim figures in Fleet black uniforms, with gold rank and merit decorations. Those were certainly daemons, she knew; human minds held in artificial neural nets, living in artificial, perfect bodies. They didn't look that odd; they looked handsome, confident, but they looked human. They certainly didn't look dead, or robotic. That was a comforting thought.

  And then the passenger capsule was there, arriving from the maintenance hangar below with a vast electric hum. The wide silver doors slid open, and the lounge emptied as people boarded. The passenger capsule was larger than a mag-lev train car, but vertical, with decks stacked up, one over the other, with a bank of substantial elevators inside to let the passengers move between decks. There were seating decks, with wide crystal clear view ports, and also compartments to rest or sleep, and even a restaurant deck.

  Zandy found a seat next to one of the view ports. A small display in her seat's armrest came to life, running a short safety vid, showing diagrams of locations of emergency escape-and-reentry pods, and going over what to do in the event of a loss of cabin pressure. The capsule started its ascent while she watched the safety vid, lifting with a smooth, soaring acceleration and a deep hum that resonated through her seat.

  It was a long ride. The passenger capsule took more than five hours to climb the more than 35,000 kilometers to the station. At first the feeling of speed was amazing; the capsule shot away from the tower, speeding up rapidly till it was running up the orbital elevator track at more than five hundred kilometers an hour. The view was unbelievable. Imitating some other passengers, Zandy got up from her seat and walked around the seating deck, looking through the large view ports to all sides. She could see all of the Surface Port city, spread out below her and stretching out away from the elevator in all directions. She could see Neomiletus from here. The smaller city's outer reaches mingled with the edge of the urban zone of the New Ionia Surface Port. She could even see, distantly, the pattern of residence zones around Neomiletus, but she was not sure which had been hers.

  The feeling of ascent reminded her of elevators she had been in, when she had visited the City Center of Neomiletus; it felt as if she were being pressed into the floor; the capsule was accelerating. Eventually, she got back to her seat. The vid screen in her seat's arm-rest offered an option to look down, through video cameras mounted at the bottom of the capsule, and Zandy selected the view. Far below was the orbital elevator tower, and around it the foreshortened buildings of the Surface Port. The vast towers looked tiny from the growing altitude.

  The sky darkened as the capsule soared up. The elevator capsule reached a thousand kilometers per hour in the thin upper atmosphere. Once the atmosphere was below them, in space, they really sped up; the vid screen display showed that the maximum speed was almost nine thousand kilometers per hour, two point five KPS, before the capsule started slowing down, approaching the Geosynchronous Station.

  Up until the turn-over point, Zandy had not been in free-fall. At first, New Ionia's gravity, and then the acceleration of the capsule, had kept the floor feeling like it was "down." But when, 33,000 kilometers above New Ionia, with the whole planet looking like a blue and white ball far below, the pod had started decelerating, the floor was suddenly "up" and Zandy was suddenly "upside down." It was Zandy's first experience with variable gee. And then her first experience with free-fall, as the capsule arrived at the enormous Geosynchronous Station.

  For a girl from the residence zones, who had never before been out of her home city, it was a whirlwind. The New Ionia Geosynchronous Station was an enormous cylinder, more than a kilometer across, three kilometers tall. The elevator passed through it, heading deeper into space, to the High Orbit Tether Station, another 20,000 kilometers up. But New Ionia Geosynchronous Station was where a dazed Zandy got off.

  Perhaps, Zandy thought, the Academy staff were used to collecting people like her. At any rate, they did not make her wait for long, picking her up in the passenger lounge at the disembarkation point. By the time they had gotten to her, Zandy had learned to crawl along in free-fall, hand over hand down the color-coded grab-rails that crisscrossed the lounge and the vast central spaces of the station. She had also learned that her idea of somehow spending some time sightseeing would be harder than she expected. Everything, down to a bulb of drinking water, was so expensive that the carefully hoarded money she had brought wouldn't have lasted a single day.

  Even so, in the hour she waited at the lounge Zandy saw things that amazed her. Her brother had been right about Modifieds; among the people floating by there were a few that were obviously Modified. Some had fur, or scales or tufts of iridescent feathers! Some had sky-blue skin or crimson red skin, or hair, or eyes. Some had tiger-stripes or other patterns. Some, the most disturbing and intriguing, had faces that blended human and inhuman: feline or reptilian features, or features like some sort of pixies or elves from a fantasy vid. Most of the normal looking people barely bothered to look at them.

  The clothing all these people wore, Modified, normal and aristokratai, was also like nothing Zandy had ever seen. Some were nearly nude, and what clothing they did have didn't cover the parts she would have expected; there was a Modified woman with colorful sleeves and leggings, with her face hidden behind a data visor and her leopard patterned chest left bare! Others wore clothes with wing-like fans attached to the arms and legs. Many wore clothes with the logos of different corporations or guilds. The styles and cuts and colors and materials were a parade of things Zandy had never seen before. And this, thought Zandy, was just a passenger lounge.

  From the moment the handsome young-looking man in Fleet black had collected her, Zandy's voyage became even more of a blur. He checked her identity, indulgently letting her show her ID chit before telling her that he had already pinged the ID chit and confirmed who she was by data feed as soon as he saw her. There was one other person here from the Academy, and another fourteen cadets to be collected, and for a few minutes, as he scanned the crowd for the other cadets, the man had spoken to her, talking in a friendly way about the ride up the elevator, asking if it had been her first time, and smiling with amusement at the double-entendre.

  Then the fifteen cadets were all together and the two Academy proctors were guiding them into an intra-station tram, heading for an orbital transfer flight to the Academy Station. The other cadets were mostly silent, young like Zandy, looking out the windows of the tram at the zero-gee metropolis of the station. There were holographic signs and marquees everywhere, advertising everything Zandy could imagine, and lots of things she couldn't figure out. The tram ran down the center of a vast circular tunnel full of people, shops, signs and lights. People floated across the space, or moved along motorized, color-coded hand rails, or flitted about in little one and two person transports that looked a little like flying scooters. Even more than in the passenger lounge, Zandy could see the overwhelming diversity of the people who lived or worked here, or were just passing through. Again she wondered which of the thousands of people she saw were human, and which were
biosims. If she could have, Zandy would have people watched for hours. The tram was pulling up to the docking ring for orbital transfer shuttles before it occurred to Zandy that the Academy proctor she had chatted with must have been aristokratai.

  It was all too strange for words, to Zandy. The shuttle, with its odd, slightly stale plastic-and-something-else smell, and its cramped seats with multiple restraints, was almost anti-climactic. The flight was a series of rumbling sounds and firm pushes into the seat, with long periods of weightlessness and silence except for the sounds of the air vents and the slowly growing conversation of the cadets.

  Her first flight on a spaceship, Zandy thought. It was really happening; not just the flight, but the whole thing. Somehow she had gone through with it. She was off of New Ionia, in space, headed for the Fleet Academy and a future she could not really imagine, save that it would be nothing at all like the life she had led to this point.

  The cadets spoke to each other, telling about themselves. All were demoi, born to demoi families. Only three, counting herself, were from the residence zones, but Zandy didn't get the sense of any real hostility from the wealthier cadets. Only one boy had been in space before, on a business trip with his mother, up the elevator.

  There was a fair bit of bravado, Zandy thought. No one spoke of doubts now. No one admitted to fear. No one mentioned daemons either, though the two Academy proctors, who had to be daemons themselves, were sitting in the compartment with them.

  Somehow, the actual Academy made less of an impression in Zandy's memory than that first impossible day when she left New Ionia did. The Academy Station orbited one of New Ionia's three small moons, a cylindrical space station which was only about a quarter the size of the vast New Ionia Geosynchronous Station, but which was, Zandy discovered, still really big.

  From the very start there had been so much to see, but next to no time to see it. Fleet ships docked at the Academy Station; there were sleek swift-ships and one enormous lance-ship, half a kilometer long, tethered to the docking arms that projected, needle-like, from the axis of the station. Zandy would have gawked if she had gotten more than just a momentary look.

  The rim of the station held the spin-gravity rings, where they were shown their quarters, but much of the instruction took place in free-fall at the core of the station. Learning to move well in free-fall was part of the routine.

  The routine was intense. The new cadets were given almost no time to acclimate, instead being thrown into their new life, the complex world of the Fleet. Parts of it, Zandy was sure, were intended to shock the cadets.

  The quarters were not segregated by gender, and there were no provisions for privacy or modesty. That was a hard shock for Zandy, but the uniformity of it, the fact that all of the cadets were in the same place, treated the same way, made it a bit easier to deal with.

  The biggest shock, for most of the cadets, was a trip to the Academy clinic for brain surgery. A few of the cadets already had direct interface implants that were up to Fleet standards. For all the rest, the Fleet provided an implant. The only mercy, Zandy found, was that it happened so quickly that she did not have time to be really scared. The cadets were ordered to the medical section without explanation, sent into surgery without delay, and the first moment that Zandy really had, at leisure, to consider it, was the day she was given to recover, before learning to use direct interface became part of her training.

  There was a lot of training. Much of it was what Zandy had expected of military training: hard physical work, learning commands and basic discipline, learning the rules of the Fleet. Even more time went into class work; courses came at an insane pace; it was as if the instructors were trying to burst her brain, cramming in knowledge with a ruthless pace and efficiency.

  There were two hundred cadets, all told, brought in over the course of a few hundred hours. Zandy shared quarters with three other cadets, two boys, one girl. She learned names and where they came from. She got to know what they had wanted when they accepted a place at the Academy. And she got to know what she had wanted too.

  The easiest part of it, Zandy knew, was, paradoxically, that it was so hard. The training was so intense that there was no time for doubts; no second thoughts, no time for worries. The courses and training came in sixteen hour bursts, with eight hours for sleep and free time, much more of the former than the latter. The cycle was deliberately off from the 21 standard hours (plus one shorter compensation hour) of a New Ionian day. It was a match for an Old-Earth day, Zandy learned, and wondered if that was why it had been chosen.

  Basic Selection Training ran a full tenkay: ten thousand hours. In that time there would be no leave, no vacations, no deviation from the schedule. Zandy sent messages to her family, to be delivered by mail, on hard copy. For the first time, it struck her as a terribly strange that her family should not own even a single pers-comp or data terminal that could connect to the New Ionian data and communications network. She supposed that her siblings still had their school-issued data readers, but those had only been able to read self-contained data-vid chips and receive short text messages from the school. But, whatever the reason, she never got a reply.

  There were a few other cadets from the residence zones as well, but whatever common ground she thought she might have had with them came to nothing, and Zandy found that her closest companions were her roommates.

  There was Lydia Sasanar, the other girl, dark haired and with a short but curvy figure that Zandy was vaguely envious of, though Lydia in turn was jealous of Zandy's height. Lydia was from a small town on the far side of New Ionia; demoi, but from a rich family. She'd already had an implant, though the Fleet had replaced it with a better one. Then there were the two boys, Philip and Gan. Philip Lee, Phil, was demoi, from a colony world one FTL transit from New Ionia, called Second Chance. His family were farmers, and the little bits of his life that Zandy got to hear of sounded unreal: running soil reclamation machines, dealing with crop shipments, hunting down local pack predators that threatened the livestock. It sounded adventurous to Zandy, though maybe not in comparison to what they were going through now. Phil was tall and lanky, and somehow looked like a farmer, with his natural orange-red hair. Not bad looking, though, Zandy thought.

  Last was Gan. Ganymede Sandros was from an aristokratai lineage. He was, counter to the stereotype of a typical aristokratai youth, a frank and open young man. On the other hand, just like the stereotype, he was very handsome, almost pretty, with refined features and dark hair that contrasted intriguingly with pale green eyes. Gan had told them without hedging that he had failed the Examination that all children of the aristokratai were allowed to take, to confirm their aristokratai status without recourse to the Academies' Basic Selection Training. But he had made it into the Fleet Academy, to the relief of his mother, who was a telestos, a high rank in the New Ionia government service. Zandy had asked about his father, and Gan had laughed.

  "No father. I'm a cross-gender clone of mom."

  "Oh."

  "It's not that uncommon, you know. A lot of aristos have non-conventional children. I mean, it's non-conventional from the start; it's not like they can have normal children. They all have their genetic material banked, but once you do that, you can get creative really easy. I knew one girl, she was a gene-mix of six women; her primary mother gave 50% of the genome and her mother's five favorite female lovers contributed the rest."

  "Oh," Zandy had said again, and decided to let the topic go.

  The time went fast at the Academy. Learning to understand and use the data feeds, learning military law, custom and forms of address, basic training in weapons, tactics, learning Hegemonic history, military sociology and psychology... there were courses that Zandy had never even heard the names of. A million things were pushed into her mind through direct interface data feeds.

  Not everyone could keep up. By the time five thousand hours had passed, there were only about a hundred cadets left. Some of those who couldn't stay in were transferred to ser
ve in New Ionia's System Defense Force as demoi enlisted personnel; those were allowed to keep their implants. Some were rejected entirely, sent back to New Ionia after a quick surgery to strip them of the Fleet-issued direct interface implants. Zandy heard rumors that some of the ones rejected that way wound up suiciding. After five thousand hours at the Academy, it didn't surprise her.

  In her moments of free time, Zandy thought that she was not much like the Alekzandra Neel who had arrived at the Academy. It had been thousands of hours since she had worn anything but a cadet's version of the uniform Fleet Blacks. She could now read the gold symbols on a uniform and instantly know the rank, qualification ratings, operational specialty and commendations of the Fleet member she was looking at. She was as comfortable in free-fall as under acceleration; she didn't even think to call it "gravity," though she could tell how many gees it was by feel, to a decent accuracy. She was comfortable using a data feed, letting her brain accept information that ignored her own senses. She could use a pulse-laser, and field strip it. She had learned the basics of telestraal, the Hegemony's gunfighting martial art. She knew the fundamentals of orbital maneuvering and deep space navigation and the basic workings of singularity reactors and plasma drives. She was a long way from the empty life she had dreaded in Residence Zone Garnet, though it amused her just how much her new life was pre-fabricated by the Fleet, and how little that mattered to her.

  There were some free moments. The Academy encouraged athletics among the cadets, and Zandy found an aptitude for free-fall basketball that pleased both her and the instructors. Some cadets found a measure of psychological stability in religious services, though after attending a few sermons, Zandy decided it was not worth her limited free time.

  She took some lovers, at first wondering if it was forbidden, and then knowing that the Academy expected it. First there was Gan, who proved to be a sophisticated partner. Gan had been a revelation to her, as far as sex went. But Gan was uninterested in anything lasting. Then there was Phil, who was more of a friend with sex thrown in as a benefit. The casual nature of it, with no privacy in the shared room, wasn't even weird to Zandy anymore. For that matter, she would once have been infuriated that her lovers were also Lydia's lovers, and now that just seemed natural. The ethos of the Fleet was radically different from what she had once known in Residence Zone Garnet.