The others shook their heads. “I think you’re imagining it, Womicki,” Garroway said.
“Fuck you. Here. Look.” Womicki pulled a canteen from a hip pouch in his armor, pulled off the cap, and dribbled a bit of water into it. Carefully, he set it on the ground. “Watch.”
The other Marines stared at the cap for a moment. Sure enough, minute ripples were stirring the surface of the water. Garroway held very still, trying to feel it. There. A faint, faint quivering vibration through the pavement stones at his feet.
“Earthquakes,” Womicki explained. “They’re almost continuous but so faint you can hardly feel ’em. Once in a while they get strong enough to notice.”
“Not Earthquakes,” Vinita said. “Ishtarquakes?”
“Seismic events,” Dunne suggested.
“Yeah,” Garvey agreed. “I wonder how all these buildings stay standing so long with this kind of shaking going on all the time.”
“That’s why the locals build pyramids and domes,” Dunne pointed out. “And nothing over a couple-three stories tall, except for the big pyramids.” He joined his hands together, steepling his fingers in a rough pyramid shape and working it back and forth. “The stones tend to fall together and hold one another up. Unless a really big quake hit, the buildings stay stable.”
“I remember something from a download,” Garroway said, “about there not being any major fault lines on Ishtar, so you don’t get the sudden slippage that makes major earthquakes, like in California. You just get a lot of little tremors from the tidal flexing as Ishtar goes around Marduk.”
“Y’know,” Garvey said, “if we had the damned net online, we’d be able to link in with the data feed from orbit and all the ground stations and see how widespread it was, where the center of it was….”
“Shit,” Garroway said. “We’re doing okay without the net. We just don’t have as many people looking over our shoulders as we used to, is all.”
His own words surprised him. For a time there, back on the mountain, he’d felt nightmarishly alone and isolated without the MIEU Net, much as he’d felt when they’d deactivated his Sony-TI 12000. The nanohardware in his head handled a good many minor and routine tasks—math coprocessing and direction sensing, for instance—and all he was really missing was the ability to download large amounts of data with a thought-click or talk to other Marines with an inner voice akin to telepathy.
He was just now realizing, though, that losing his high-powered hardware in boot camp had gotten them all used to making do with whatever was at hand. Womicki’s trick with the canteen lid, for instance. That was damned clever…and didn’t require data feeds from orbit or the local node to tell him what he wanted to know.
Maybe people were getting too damned reliant on their techy toys.
But then again…
He stole a glance at Kat Vinita. She seemed okay now, if a bit distant, a little floaty, a bit too placid. She was riding high on NNTs, he guessed, holding her emotions at bay, anesthetizing them until professional psychs could help her deal with them. The tech was holding her together now, but what would the cost be later on?
“Halt!” Garvey called out. “Who goes there?”
A woman, a civilian in a dark green jumpsuit emblazoned with the Spirit of Humankind logo, had approached the group. “I’m Dr. Hanson,” she said.
“This is a restricted area, ma’am,” Garvey told her.
“And I have authorization,” she replied, holding up a scrap of white paper.
Garvey accepted the paper clumsily in a gauntleted hand and peered at the writing. “Signed by Colonel Ramsey,” he said, handing the paper back. “I guess it’s okay.”
“Goddess, of course it’s okay,” Hanson replied. She sounded tired and on edge. “What did you think, I’m here to steal the bodies?”
“No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
“Feeling a bit low-tech, there, Gravy?” Womicki asked with a chuckle.
“It’s a hell of a lot easier when you can interrogate the net for pass authorizations,” Garvey replied, stepping aside. “How are we supposed to know that pass is genuine?”
“Don’t sweat it, kid,” Dunne said with a shrug. “She don’t look like the kind t’want to cut off Frog ears for souvenirs. Let her do her job.”
“Frogs don’t have ears,” Garvey said. “Just those damned big staring eyes.”
“The civilians are here to study the Ahannu,” Vinita said. “We’re just supposed to keep other Marines away from this stuff.”