Nicole Shea 02 - Grounded! by Chris Claremont

Author:Chris Claremont [Claremont, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-07T23:46:19+00:00

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nine

“FOR FIVE YEARS, Nicole,” Maguire said with a bitter anger that was made all the more intense by her tight control, “those people operated throughout the Belt and we didn’t have a clue there was even a problem out there! If it weren’t for Morgan’s obsession with General Canfield, we probably wouldn’t know to this day!”

She’d presented Nicole with a copy of her master case file, the same as she would one of her own deputies, and they’d gone through it together, entry by painstaking entry, until they were so bleary-eyed the very words stopped making sense. It was Maguire who suggested a workout before bed, clearing time for them in the gym.

They stood at the main entrance, with the room stretching before them, a featureless cube some twenty meters to a side that had originally been intended as a maintenance bay. Projecting out from the walls, at a variety of lengths and angles, were a maze of metal bars, forming a surrealist jungle gym. You pulled yourself from one to the next, along a programmed path that would ultimately bring you back to where you started, sort of like combining a slalom with show jumping. There were levels of difficulty, of course, with established times for each. Never a tournament or a prize. Everyone’s level and time was logged and accessible; essentially, you measured yourself against your peers and that was that. Last time she was here, Nicole thought she’d done pretty well, but a glance at the terminal by the hatch told her she’d fallen something of a ways since.

Being at the heart of the station meant total weightlessness, which normally mandated all footwear to have Velcro gripsoles to anchor them to strips that ran at intervals along the bulkheads. The elimination of gravity took with it all but the most arbitrary concepts of “up” and “down,” which meant as well that there was no such thing as a true “floor” or “ceiling.” Any flat surface qualified, depending on what a person’s orientation was at any given time. And could change with a move. So designers had to allow—at least in this section of the station—for all those planes being used. Here, though, the idea wasn’t to stick, but to bounce. As hard and fast as possible. Which meant standard sneaks—in Nicole’s case, borrowed, as was everything else she was wearing—plus shorts and a rugby shirt. Knee and elbow pads, fingerless gloves that were still more than a trifle too stiff for her taste, with a helmet she’d left floating by her head.

Maguire set up an expert run, and Nicole watched the appropriate bars light up. The whole path flared first, to give a sense of the route. Once the player started though, they’d only flash three bars ahead—to show where she was, where she was going next, and the one after that. The Maze was a test of skill and agility, that also forced you to think on the run and required a total awareness of your body’s relationship to the space around it.

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