Free Exultant by Stephen Baxter Page B

bloated. There was always sex, of course, but even the appeal of that faded. Pirius came to suspect uneasily that the fact they could screw as much as they liked here took away a lot of the appeal of their under-the-blanket barracks fumbles.
    In quiet moments on the third day, Pirius tried to analyze his feelings for Torec.
    Obviously Seath had assumed they were a stable couple, that their relationship was strong. But the truth was that Torec had only ever been a buddy. For now she was his favored squeeze, and vice versa, but that might have changed overnight, without hard feelings or regrets. In the Barracks Ball, there was a lot of choice, and a
lot
of bunk-hopping. Sex was all about athletics, and a bit of comfort. Surely they weren’t in
love.
Were they doomed to spend their lives together even so?
    Of course there was nobody to discuss this with—certainly not the Commissary, and they hadn’t even
seen
the crew. The ensigns had nobody but each other.
    And so, naturally, on the fourth day they turned on each other.
    By the fifth day, after hours of screaming rows, they were exhausted and regretful. In their striving to hurt each other they had both said many things they hadn’t meant, the most hurtful for Pirius being the charge that he had ruined Torec’s life, for it held a grain of truth.
    They came back to each other for comfort. The day became a good day, a day of tenderness. Having endured the storm, Pirius sensed they had moved to some new level in their relationship. Perhaps, he began to wonder, eventually they really would find love.
    But then the sixth day came, just another day in this unwelcome luxury, and still the journey dragged on.
    At the end of the sixth day Torec escaped into sleep. But Pirius was restless. He slipped out of bed, sponged down with a clean-cloth, and pulled on a uniform. Torec stayed asleep, or at any rate pretended to.
    Pirius found Nilis sitting in a chair before the transparent hull, working at a data desk propped on his knee. The Commissary smiled at Pirius and waved him to another chair.
    Pirius sat stiffly, and gazed at the panorama out of the window.
    The corvette’s FTL drive, working smoothly and silently, was making many jumps per second, and it seemed to Pirius that the scattered stars were sliding past his field of view. But after each jump the corvette was briefly stationary relative to the Galaxy’s frame of reference. So there were none of the effects of velocity you’d expect from a sublight drive, no redshift or blueshift, no aberration; they crossed the Galaxy in a series of still frames.
    For Pirius it was a strange sky. Far from the Core now, they were moving out through the Galaxy’s plane. They were passing through the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy, one of its richest regions outside of the Core itself. There were plenty of stars, but they seemed scattered and remote—and, remarkably,
not one
of them was close enough to show a disc. Even between the stars the sky was odd, black, and empty. It seemed a quiet, dull, low-energy sort of environment to Pirius.
    Not only that, you could actually tell you were embedded in a sheet of stars. If Pirius looked straight ahead his eyes met a kind of horizon, a faint band of gray-white light that marked the position of the Galactic equator: the light of millions of stars muddled up together. Away from the plane, overhead or down below, there were only scattered handfuls of nearby stars—you could immediately see how thin this disc was—and beyond that there was only blackness, the gulf, he supposed, of intergalactic space.
    The corvette wasn’t alone. It was one of a stream of ships, a great thread of swimming sparks that slid across the face of the Galaxy. If he looked around the sky he could see more streams of light, all more or less parallel to this one, some of them passing back to the center, others running out to the periphery. Occasionally a companion ship passed close enough to make out detail. These were