Every kid gets bored, right?
You grow up in a place, and no matter how amazing and wondrous it really is, there's a part of you that just doesn't care, doesn't appreciate the subtlety or the charm or whatever it is that someone who had never been there before could find in a heartbeat. Everything can become common if you let it, and when you're a teenager you're likely as not to just sit back, shut your eyes, and let the wonderful become mundane.
I did.
I grew up on the Grid. Not in the proverbial, pre-Expansion sense of being "On The Grid," but in the sense that I was born and raised a twelfth-generation hydrogen farmer on the single largest thing humanity has ever built. That Grid. The Jovian Grid.
Nine thousand rings, half on the y-axis, half on the x-axis, each four hundred and fifty thousand kilometers in circumference, holding themselves in place, depending completely on each other to keep themselves from plunging into the roiling storm of Jupiter itself. It started as two rings, built five hundred years ago by two thousand lunatics who decided that the Belt mines were too cozy and too comfortable or something, so they built themselves a Loop and Whipped to Jupiter.
I grew up on the insane, utterly massive brain-child of some of the most skilled and antisocial engineers that have ever lived. Living proof that a solid annoyance with most other living beings, a mastery of physics and math, and graceful, intense genetic manipulation can lead to some truly awe-inspiring things.
From a distance, it looked like a tumbling series of delicate wires wrapping gently around the whole of the planet. Thousands of strands with countless wisps of fiber trailing off and caressing the surface; a dancing, twirling arrangement of supremely coordinated and deceptively strong mechanisms and machines. Habs and parkland and industrial columns were spliced into lifts and tubes and a sparkling, glowing dance of activity that could inspire legend and steal the breath from your lungs with its beauty and complexity.
And I didn't give a shit.
I left when I was eighteen, having worked the farms since I was twelve, saving every red cred. I Whipped to the Belt, and from there to Home System. I spent three days watching the Moon get bigger and bigger in smaller and smaller increments as we decelerated enough that we could rejoin one of the receiving Loops and shuttle to Armstrong City.
From there I caught a Drop to Earth, and lived out the last of my savings in Chicago, where my ancestors' ancestors had come from something like a thousand years before. It was like an insane, booze and drug-fueled Rumspringa a thousand years removed from the last one performed in the original context. I met girls, drank a lot, smoked and snorted everything I could get my hands on, and rebuilt the brain cells with an hour or two in a StemPod once or twice a week.
Then the money ran out, and real life ran back in. I needed a job, and I needed one fast.
There aren't a whole lot of things that a Jovian kid is actually qualified to do, as it turned out. Luckily for me, the Fleet can find a job for damn near anybody.
Even there, I had two options: Fuel Collection Specialist, or Offship Maneuvers.
I didn't fancy traveling almost six hundred million kilometers just to do the same job I'd left behind, so Offship Maneuvers it was.
Turns out Jovians are damned near perfect for Offship. Remember when I talked about genetic manipulation? Well, Jovians are the product of rather a lot of it. We had to be, or we would never get anything done. Or have survived at all, for that matter.
We were altered to not only survive but thrive in Jupiter's insane gravity, able to function in three gees like we're going for a stroll in the park. Our tissue is interwoven with an organic fiber that lets us work and play under that kind of stress forever if need be, our organs reinforced with the same stuff. We reprogrammed our cardiovascular systems to adjust and keep an even, steady flow going in any amount of gravity from zero to twenty gees, and could maintain consciousness and more or less clear thought up to thirty without a suit.
Decompression is a big worry in habs that hang outside any atmosphere, so we took away that concern. Our core temperature won't start to drop until things get down around negative one eighty Celsius, and that organic fiber reinforces our skin and works in conjunction with our physiology to cause it to constrict slightly and provide back pressure in the event of slight or total decompression. All we need to survive in vacuum is a source of breathable air. We even have a nictitating membrane that keeps our eyes from doing anything annoying like changing shape and blinding us or exploding out of our skulls. Thanks to our skin and our lovely organs, we can hold our breath for anywhere from fifteen to ninety minutes, depending on how much energy we expend.
When I said I wasn't qualified for much in the Fleet, it wasn't because Jovians are stupid. We have the same brain power that everybody else does. We just don't fit in things designed for the average person.
See, all that engineering and genetic wizardry wouldn't mean shit if we didn't have the strength to move around. Jovians tend to be big. Damn big by comparison to most, as I learned very quickly upon leaving.
So, when you're 2.2 meters and you weigh two hundred and fifty-five kilograms by Earth standard gravity, you don't really fit into a fighter or have space to work in a lab or on a bridge or in the bowels of a shipboard propulsion system. You can move through the passageways and not squish people passing you against the bulkheads, but only just.
Offship is the modern equivalent of being a grunt. Combat in space is done the old fashioned and dirty way. Loading a ship up with weaponry that won't send it flying off course or spinning crazily along is expensive as hell, and expending propulsion to force it to handle and adjust to weaponry that would do so is impractical as hell, so fights between ships in space consist of two ships pulling up alongside each other (or slamming into each other), cutting holes in one another, and pouring people who are trained to fight in zero gee through the holes.
I know what you're thinking. Gravity on ships is totally a thing. We have that. And you're right. We DO have that. But, we make that by spinning parts of the ships in opposite directions. On civilian ships, this is usually a series of tori of various diameters depending on the size of the ship. On Fleet ships and pirate vessels, the spinning parts tend to be much smaller and a lot more dense, with large parts of the ships fixed and without gravity. That's because locking two spinning bits of different ships together will, generally speaking, tear one or both ships apart. That's bad.
So, most shipboard combat takes place in the non-spinning, gravity-free parts of ships. You can probably figure out for yourself why being a giant with no fear of decompression comes in kind of handy in that situation.
I served eighty years with the Fleet, patrolling everywhere from Earth to Neptune, hunting pirates and settling conflicts between colonies. As careers go, it was a good one, and I retired at the rank of Master Chief.
These days, people only die of old age if they WANT to, so being in my late nineties made me still a kid by most standards, and I looked no different than I had when I joined up with the subtle exception of the few scars I had elected to keep as reminders of enemies who had earned my respect.
The retirement package for Fleet is decent. At ten years, you get enough per month to live out the rest of your days on the Belt in a small but decent apartment. At twenty, you can retire comfortably in Armstrong City. At thirty, you get a stipend that will let you buy a place on Earth if you want, or shoot yourself all over the system as an eternal tourist if you want, or do just about anything else you decide to do.
I decided to go home.
Not forever. I didn't have any desire to take hydrogen farming back up, and Jovians don't look too kindly on permanent residents that don't DO anything.
But, I hadn't seen my family or my schoolmates in eighty years, and I had grown an appreciation for the beauty and complex, insane wonder of my home through years of describing it to men and women who sometimes made it back to their own homes and sometimes didn't.
I rented a cabin on an economy class Pusher, the Marilona, and burned for home. Pushers are the slowest way to get around, and the cheapest. They burn at four gees for fifteen minutes and spend the rest of the trip under no thrust, moving fast enough to hit the Ring in about nine months, with half of that being deceleration. They're big, slow, and usually carry people moving to the Ring to start a new life. They come with, in descending order of comfort, small cabins, tiny bunks, and large communal racks. There are exercise tori, rec areas, mine even had a small theater that played the same ten movies over and over on a continuous loop.
The crew was made up of mostly Lifers, people who had been born on the ship, or, at least, a very similar ship. Like most specialized groups of humanity, they had some genetic modifications of their own. They tended to be tall and thin, some of them close to my height, but invariably a hundred and eighty kilos or more lighter. Pushers are all about conserving power and fuel, so most of the crew areas ran either dark or damn close to it, saving the power for silly things like extra lights for the passengers. Because of that, they tended toward alabaster skin, big eyes, and hair that was dyed a variety of colors. Passengers didn't actually see many of them, instead, we were mostly left to our own devices.
For the first two weeks, I managed to mostly avoid being seen. I stuck to my cabin, my food delivered to my doorstep by a crew member that I never saw, leaving only to use one of the free exercise tori in the middle of the sleep cycles, hoping not to run into anyone. It was the exercise tori that gave me away.
I knew they would.
The tori are clever things, designed small enough that their increased spin won't throw off the rest of the ship, providing fully adjustable gravity with enough equipment to keep anybody in shape and fight off muscle and bone loss for those who actually had to worry about that. Most people set it for a full gee, some fitness buffs go for one and a half or two. I set mine to six, and go as hard as I can for a couple of hours like I never left the Fleet.
Somebody was bound to notice.
