| wellis |
August 19th, 2018 12:38 PM |
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Originally Posted by Golan2072
(Post 591294)
I like this idea! Yoinked!
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Here is a little more on the juice:
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Going on the juice was pilot-speak for a high-g burn that would knock an unmedicated human unconscious. The juice was the cocktail of drugs the pilot’s chair would inject into him to keep him conscious, alert, and hopefully stroke-free when his body weighed five hundred kilos. Holden had used the juice on multiple occasions in the navy, and coming down afterward was unpleasant.
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Alex began the countdown over the general comm. Holden checked the straps on his crash couch and palmed the button that started the juice. A dozen needles stuck into his back through membranes in his suit. His heart shuddered and chemical bands of iron gripped his brain. His spine went dead cold, and his face flushed like a radiation burn. He pounded a fist into the arm of the crash couch. He hated this part, but the next one was worse. On the general comm, Alex whooped as the drugs hit his system. Belowdecks, the others were getting the drugs that kept them from dying but kept them sedated through the worst of it.
Alex said, “One,” and Holden weighed five hundred kilos. The nerves at the back of his eye sockets screamed at the massive load of his eyeballs. His testicles crushed themselves
against his thighs. He concentrated on not swallowing his tongue. Around him, the ship creaked and groaned. There was a disconcerting bang from belowdecks, but nothing on his panel went red. The Knight’s torch drive could deliver a lot of thrust, but at the cost of a prodigious fuel-burn rate. But if they could save the Cant, it wouldn’t matter.
Over the blood pounding in his ears, Holden could hear Ade’s gentle breathing and the click of her keyboard. He wished he could just go to sleep to that sound, but the juice was
singing and burning in his blood. He was more awake than he’d ever been.
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“Okay, buckle up, kids,” Alex said. “Here comes the juice.”
Even before Alex had finished saying it, Holden felt a dozen pinpricks as his chair pumped him full of drugs to keep him alive during the coming deceleration. His skin went tight and
hot, and his balls crawled up into his belly. Alex seemed to be speaking in slow motion.
“Five… four… three… two… ”
He never said one. Instead, a thousand pounds sat on Holden’s chest and rumbled like a laughing giant as the Roci’s engine slammed on the brakes at ten g’s. Holden thought he
could actually feel his lungs scraping the inside of his rib cage as his chest did its best to collapse. But the chair pulled him into a soft gel-filled embrace, and the drugs kept his heart
beating and his brain processing. He didn’t black out. If the high-g maneuvering killed him, he’d be wide awake and lucid for the entire thing.
His helmet filled with the sound of gurgling and labored breathing, only some of which was his own. Amos managed part of a curse before his jaw was clamped shut. Holden couldn’t
hear the Roci shuddering with the strain of her course change, but he could feel it through the seat. She was tough. Tougher than any of them.
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How fast was it going to go? Even on the juice they couldn’t sustain
prolonged acceleration past seven or eight g without serious risk.
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In addition, since this Traveller may not have artificial gravity, might that mean many passengers and spacers either use drugs or gene-engineering to help protect themselves against damage from micro/zero-gravity?
From The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton:
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Joshua Calvert
Born in Tranquillity. His father, Marcus Calvert, was the owner and captain of the
starshipLady Macbeth. Marcus died from organ failure due to substance and neural-
stimulant abuse following a long term of depression after his last flight in theLady
Macbeth , during which the ship was damaged. Joshua was ten years old when
Marcus died, and inherited his starship. His mother subsequently remarried.
Joshua has considerable geneering in his heritage, since the Calverts have been
involved in the space industry for centuries, and have been modified accordingly.
They do not suffer from free-fall sickness, and their bones and internal organs can
withstand relatively high acceleration.
Joshua raised enough funds to repair theLady Macbeth by scavenging the Ruin Ring
for xenoc artifacts. The starship is now flown as an independent trader, traveling from
system to system with commercial cargo.
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He started to take off his ship’s one-piece. His body was slim and well muscled, the chest slightly broader than average, pointers to the thickened internal membranes, and a metabolism which refused to let him bloat no matter how much he ate or drank. His family’s geneering had concentrated purely on the practicalities of free-fall adaptation, so he was left with a face that was rather too angular, the jaw too prominent, to be classically handsome, and mouse-brown hair which he kept longer than he ought to for flying. His retinal implants were the same colour as the original irises: blue-grey.
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There was also a bit where Joshua is mentioned to grow no body hair or facial hair, like whiskers, due to dangers of the hair being shed and getting into electronics, IIRC. |
