The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas

man then looked toward the wall and said, “Right. He’s ready.”

      Part of the wall unfolded then into a tangle of gleaming tubes, arms, and sensors. Cables with EEG contacts touched Garroway lightly at various points on his scalp. Thoughts flickered through his consciousness, downloading through his cerebralink … a burst of violet light, a chord of organ music, and words, a gentle, female voice saying, “Please relax.”

      Garroway had been in AI-doctor treatment rooms before—each time he’d been given an injection of medical nano, in fact—but the experience always verged on the unsettling. A pair of robotic arms gently clasped his head and shoulders, immobilizing them in thick-padded fingers. A third hand, lighter and more delicate, reached down with glittering fingers and plucked the loaded injector off the table, then approached his neck with the injector clasped tightly in its metallic grip. Garroway felt a brief stab of fear … but then a gentle current flowing through the link dispersed the emotion, replacing it with a sense of quiet, placid euphoria. He barely felt the touch of the jet spray against his throat, just below the angle of his jaw at the left carotid artery.

      He imagined he could feel the antinano fizzing up inside his brain, seeking out the nanochelates clustered within the deeper rifts of his cranial sulci and dissolving them. It was imagination, of course, since he had no sensory nerves inside his brain, but the feeling was real and distinctly odd nonetheless. In another moment he thought he could feel the chelated contact points in the palms of his hands softening as well, as the silver-gold-carbon alloy of the palmlinks was absorbed back into his bloodstream.

      One feeling that was decidedly not in his imagination, though, was the sense of diminishment … a kind of shrinking of mind and awareness. For one confused and near-panicky moment, it felt as though he was somehow being muffled in layers of unseen insulation. His hearing felt … dead, as well as his sense of touch, and something like a translucent gray mist dropped across his vision. Dozens of separate sensations shriveled, as though drawing back from his consciousness … smells, sounds, sensations of touch and temperature, and even vision itself becoming less intense, less there.

      “Goddess …” he said, his voice sounding distant in his ears. He felt a little dizzy, a bit light-headed, and he might have fallen over if the robotic doctor hadn’t been gently but firmly holding him upright on the table.

      “Kind of rocks you, doesn’t it?” the corpsman said. “How ya doing?”

      “I’m … not sure. …”

      “Can you stand?”

      “I think so.” He slid off the table, then braced himself as the dizziness returned, threatening to drop him to his knees. He swayed, then steadied, trying to clear his head. Damn it, where had the room gone?

      No, the room was still here, but he felt so oddly detached. He remembered what Logan had said about it all being inside his head and tried to focus on what he could see and sense around him, not on what was no longer there.

      Damn, he had never realized that the cybernanochelates in his brain had added so much to his perception of his surroundings. With his cerebralink operating, he’d been aware of everything within his range of vision. Now he found his visual focus only included a relatively limited area directly in front of his eyes, that he had to consciously shift his awareness to notice objects at his visual periphery. A moment before, he’d been aware of dust motes hanging in the air, of a scuff mark on the otherwise brilliant finish of the sick bay deck, of a three-K-cycle low frequency hum from the lighting panels overhead, of a small scrap of paper in the sick bay’s far corner … all without consciously focusing on them. They were simply there. Now, to his increasing dismay, he had to really look to see something and note what it was. The corpsman’s data badge no longer automatically transmitted rank and ID; he had to actually read the printed letters that spelled out HM1 D. LOGAN.

      And … what had happened to his vision? Everything was slightly fuzzy now, though he found he could tighten things up a bit by squinting. Ah. His corrective optic nano, that was it. He no longer had microsilicate structures reshaping his eyeballs to give him perfect focus.

      Was this really what it was like without cyber enhancement?

      “Man, where’d the world go?” he asked.

      “It’s still there,” Logan told him. “You just don’t have the sensory enhancement or the electronic processing tied into your cerebral cortex anymore. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be amazed what you can do with the equipment nature gave you.”

      Garroway blinked, trying to assimilate this. He’d been expecting something more or less like this, of course, but the reality carried a lot more impact than the expectation. Damn, he felt so slow, so muzzy-headed.

      He suddenly realized that he didn’t know which way was north … and he no longer carried a small, internal map of where he was and where he’d been for the past several minutes.

      For that matter, he no longer had an internal clock. He’d walked into the sick bay at 0800 hours … but how long had he been there? Several minutes, at least … but how long exactly?

      He didn’t know, had no way of knowing.

      “Go out that way,” Logan told him, jerking a thumb at a different door than the one he’d entered through. “Follow the blue line and join the rest of your company on the grinder.”

      The door had a touch pad, but it didn’t open when he laid his palm across the slick, black surface. He had to push and engage the manual control so that the door slid open to let him out.

      The blue line was painted on the wall, and if it had a cyber component to it, he couldn’t feel it, not anymore. It led him down a corridor, through several lefts and rights, depositing him at last on the steps below the sick bay’s back door. The rest of Company 1099, those who’d already gone through the process ahead of him, were waiting in ranks. Sergeant Dolby, one of 1099’s three assistant DIs, motioned him into line without comment.

      The other recruits appeared as dazed as he felt. Most, he knew—the ones who’d not been able to afford more than a basic-level cerebralink system or who’d had to rely on government-issue implants—weren’t feeling nearly as dazed as he was, but all of them looked stunned, and several looked like they were about to be sick or pass out. Dolby walked up one rank and down the next, pausing occasionally to stop and talk quietly to a recruit who looked particularly bad off. The sergeant passed him without stopping, so perhaps, Garroway reasoned, he wasn’t as bad off as he felt.

      He tried to remember what it had been like before he’d gone to the medical center at Hermosillo on his fourteenth birthday and received the injections for his Sony-TI 12000. Before that he’d had a government-issued school model, of course, implanted when he was … what? It must have been around age four or so, but school models weren’t sensory-enhanced, as a rule, and didn’t store detailed memories unless a teaching code was downloaded in order to store a specific lesson. He remembered being taught how to read, how to research any question he could imagine on the WorldNet, even how to feel good about himself, but his day-to-day memories from that time were pretty hazy.

      It took him a moment or two to realize that an hour ago, those memories would have been crystal clear. His cerebralink helped access memories, even those that had not been cataloged in downloading. He felt … diminished … shrunken, somehow … barely present.

      The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. “You okay, recruit?”

      “S-Sir.” He tried to formulate the correct response—This recruit is okay—but failed. “Yes, sir.”

      “Stay put. A doc’ll be along in a second.”

      Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room;