Free Singularity: Star Carrier: Book Three by Ian Douglas Page B

all the way around to create a 270-degree panorama of the starscape outside. The cameras transmitting the image were mounted on America ’s nonrotating spine or shield cap, so that the star field didn’t move with the turning hab modules—which included the mess deck—through a full circle.
    In the distance, several of the battlegroup’s members were taking on water—the United States of North America and the Abraham Lincoln , both Lincoln-class fleet carriers slightly smaller than the America . They looked like toys at this distance, gleaming in the hard white glow of the distant HD 157950. The supply ships Mare Orientalis, Salt Lake, and Lacus Solis drifted close by the carriers, each tucked in close against its own kilometer-wide floating iceberg, converting them to reaction mass and organic volatiles for the fleet’s nanufactories.
    “Riss,” Gray said, “it can’t be like that. Not now. I’m your CO now.”
    She laughed. “Geez, get over yourself, Trev! I’m not talking about monogie, here! Who’s going to know?”
    “ Me , for one,” Gray said. He’d not intended his voice to sound so cold.
    Her voice turned cold as well. “Very well, Lieutenant,” she said. She stood and picked up her tray. “I apologize for bothering you.”
    “Aw, sit down and eat your chow, Riss!”
    But she was gone.
    Monogie  . . .
    After three years, he was still having trouble fitting in.
    Trevor Gray was still a Prim, raised in the cast-off wreckage of the USNA’s Periphery, specifically in the Manhattan Ruins. Squatties in the Periphery didn’t have access to the high-tech toys of full citizens, like cerebral implants and Net access, and they didn’t have the social entitlements—like medical care—of citizens either. That had been why he’d agreed to join the service: to pay for the med service when Angela had had her stroke.
    Cut off from the social mainstream, Prims also had a completely different take on society. The garbage that passed for art and music, the truly bizarre fashions both in clothing and in body, the spoiled and pampered decadence of ordinary citizens, all of those were so far beyond the ken of Prims struggling just to survive within the old and flooded coastal city ruins that there seemed to be no point to social contact at all.
    One major difference had been the mainstream’s attitude toward sex—casual, recreational, and often with little or no emotional commitment. In the Ruins it was different. Couples paired for life, a survival strategy in an environment where one hunter-gatherer partner watched the other’s back.
    Throughout much of the human population, now, the mainstream view held that monogamous pairings—“monogies”—represented an archaic and flawed twist in human behavior. A few religious sects still required monogamous sexual relationships, while a few—the NeoMorms and fundamentalist Muslims, especially—allowed polygamy, but not the reverse, polyandry.
    Damn. He’d not wanted to make Rissa angry.
    Maybe when the Skipper came back and took over the squadron again. Or maybe someone else would be transferred in. Squadron CO was a commander’s billet; Gray wouldn’t even be looking at a promotion to lieutenant commander for another four years or so, and commander was a good four or five years after that, generally.
    And maybe he should just forget about having a private life at all. There were always sex feeds, downloaded through your implants. Virtual sex was as good nowadays as the real thing. . . .
    What Gray missed, he knew, was not the physical release so much as the companionship, the closeness, the belonging . When you were a part of a closely bonded pair . . .
    Damn it all to hell. . . .
    Standing, he took his tray to the mess deck entrance and tossed it and his half-eaten lunch into the converter. The Dragonfires were due to go on duty in another six hours, flying CAP just in case the Europeans went back on the hastily organized truce.
    He wondered if