Fourteen hours into the cis-lunar transit, the silence inside the Vanguard Scalpel began to develop teeth.
In deep space, far beyond the sound rumble of Earth’s air, the only sounds were the low, nonstop hum of the air scrubbers, the rhythmic click of the main gyro compass, and the faint, liquid gurgle of Echo’s nutrient tank. Without the familiar cycle of day and night, the human nervous system began to experience the insidious creep of sense disorientation.
Arthur Vance sat cross-legged on the magnetic deck plates of the mid-ship cargo bay, his eyes closed, his breathing slowed to six breaths per minute.
He wasn’t sleeping. He was calibrating the Zero-G Synaptic Gyro. A rigorous mental protocol he had developed to counteract the crippling vestibular dizziness that plagued tamers during multi-beast exact timing in zero gravity.
In terrestrial combat, a tamer’s brain naturally used the Earth’s gravity vector as a subconscious anchor. Up was up, down was down. The sense inputs of four or five distinct hunting beasts could be mapped onto a shared two-space-folding plane. But in the three-space-folding empty pocket of cis-lunar space, where enemies attacked from ball-shaped angles and “down” was merely the direction of the nearest thruster burn, linking five minds at the same time was like trying to juggle five spinning compasses in a magnetic storm.
