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when you were actually lying on the floor itself. Her calling for one was, in its own way, an announcement that they should get up. And indeed, she was disentangling herself, reaching for her clothes, letting them shimmy onto her like living things.
    Conrad reached for his own uniform's pants, inserted his feet, and let them slide up. There were all kinds of clothes in the Queendom, including spray-on, wrap-on, and clothes that looked like a ball of putty until you stepped on them or smacked them with your fist, at which point they came alive and sort of straitjacketed themselves around you, taking on some stylish cut and color. In this regard, Conrad and Xmary were a little old-fashioned for their generation. They liked to see the shape of their clothes before they put them on. They liked to pull them from the fax, look them over, request modifications, and then dress.
    And indeed, this “classique” style remained by far the Queendom's most popular, though in actual composition it only vaguely resembled the leathers and textiles of ancient times, or even the synthetic fabrics of the Old Modern era. Queendom fabrics were spun largely of silicon for one thing, and their fibers were a thousand times finer than a human hair. But like the wellstone of the hull, these wellcloth fibers moved electrons around in creative ways, forming structures that mimicked the properties of atoms and modules, radically altering the cloth's apparent composition.
    And they adjusted themselves independently, aye. Shouldn't they? Conrad had worn natural cloth from time to time—even been forced to in his days at Camp Friendly—but the stuff didn't keep you warm and dry, or cool and airy, or whatever. It didn't stop projectiles, or harden to sponge-backed diamond in a fall. It didn't even look good, not really.
    So he and Xmary weren't Luddites or Flatspacers or anything, and anyway these
Newhope
uniforms were pretty raw—green and black, flecked with hints of subliminal starlight. Xmary's had two impervium bars on the collar, where Conrad's had only one. And hers shaped itself differently around her rather different form, but otherwise they looked about the same. Which is to say: gorgeous. Anyone could be young and beautiful, but to be
stylish
was a thing the Queendom admired greatly. It was perhaps the one area where the opinion of youngsters was still considered important.
    Once the two of them were on their feet, the hologram looked a lot better, except for a stripe running down the length of it, just left of center. This defect remained stationary as the holographic cube rotated through it. Weird. Beneath it on the floor, Conrad could see a narrow, matching streak of discolored material. Frowning, he got down on his knees and scratched at it with his fingernail, feeling the difference between that and the faux metal plating around it.
    “Huh. Something wrong with the wellstone,” he muttered.
    “Broken threads?” Xmary asked.
    “It looks more like contamination.” Here was another thing he knew a bit about: matter programming, and the perils and pitfalls of wellstone. He was going to be an architect someday. “The composition of these threads has been altered. They're still working, still shuffling electrons and forming pseudoatoms, but not the right ones.”
    “It's in a perfectly straight line,” the captain said, “but it's not aligned with the ship. It just slices through. I'll bet it's a cosmic ray track.”
    “Hmm. Yeah, probably. There's a spot here on the bulkhead as well. Some kind of heavy particle firing through here at the speed of light.” He traced a path in the air with his finger, matching it with a sort of projectile noise. “I'll note it in the maintenance log, and if the nanobes haven't fixed it in a few days, we'll wake up damage control.”
    “Sounds good,” she said, then shuddered. “We're taking the same kind of damage ourselves. Our bodies.”
    “We did on Earth, too. Maybe not as much, and maybe not