Port Casper

Chapter One

Grace stretched in bed and placed the ptenda on her forearm, watching its bands encircle her wrist. The tiny screen glowed blue as it connected. Immediately a readout of her vital signs appeared, followed by adjustments to a workout regimen she'd been fiddling with a few weeks before. She knew her ptenda was entangled with a unit hundreds of kilometers away. Sometimes she could barely believe this was human technology, as common as coffee outside her cloister. Once she graduated, she might be assigned to one of those big cities. She planned on it. Imagine, each person with interlocking technology, ptenda in sync with ptenda across the grid. What would it be like, connected all the time?

Grace heard the click of the door and shoved her arm beneath the covers.

"Grace. C'mon, you gotta get up."

Flora Tannenbaum shook her gently, then moved away. Grace understood the caution. Flora was thin and easily breakable. More than once she'd swatted Flora for waking her up.

Grace turned with a blank face, like a toy doll activated. Flora waited stiffly. Grace blinked and smiled. Flora, ever anxious and easy to tease, relaxed.

"You're panting, Flora. What is it?" Grace said calmly, not a hint that she harbored forbidden technology under the sheets.

"We have the mini grinder first thing this morning, remember, and—" Flora fidgeted.

At least her friend's routine panic was punctual. Grace pushed herself up and sat on the edge of the rack in their big room on campus.

"...what if we're late, Grace? We'll catch hell."

Grace didn't mind catching hell as long as she could skin it, stuff it, and mount it on her wall.

"Don't worry, Flora. I'll be ready. I'll meet you on deck in ten minutes."

Grace waited until Flora scampered out of the room before she sighed.

The grinders were real-time, physical tests syncopating the usual academy rhythm of memorization and theory. Grace knew the grinders were necessary. People of her profession had a hazardous life, and it was better this than dying in the line of duty. Today, classmates would probably wash out.

Flora.

Grace had hoped Flora would undergo positive change, else why attend the academy? Protectors came in many sizes and abilities, each instructed in a wide range of skills, from hand-to-hand combat to espionage. But Flora didn't take to any of these disciplines, and her anxiety was dangerous. It would kill her.

Grace reached behind the headboard of her bunk. A simple biometric lock recognized her DNA and the safe opened. Grace unlatched the ptenda and stowed it, reaching for her gun. Her gaze fell on another object in the safe. A dermal dot. It was small and blue, made to adhere to the skin. Perfect for tracking an opponent. Or locating a lost friend. Like the ptenda, absolutely forbidden.

She didn't let herself think. She grabbed the dot and closed the safe. Then, like any morning, she went through her weapon safety routine.

"Stopwatch." She paused. "Start." Grace began to disassemble and reassemble her pistol in a way a magician might sleeve a card or roll a coin on the back of his hand.

Her gun, unlike the ptenda, was perfectly regulation. The Trulane ninety-two-A, nine millimeter, was a true antique that first belonged to her great-great-great-great grandfather. She called it Ronnie. It had been preserved perfectly and improved generationally: barrel extender, auto fire, round capacity, templates, biometric security, and tracking. It was still hard iron, improvements aside. Balanced, true, and crude: made to kill. Grace felt modern phasewave firearms were, by contrast, barely weapons. They had hundreds of alternative uses: shaping walls, plowing fields, pest extermination, muscle and bone therapy. She wondered, not for the first time, why ptendas were forbidden and phasewaves included in their training.