The cabin was quite spacious. She’d arrived on a more local type of vessel where passengers weren’t always the rule, and the quarters and amenities had been extremely cramped and limited in most ways. This was almost like a luxury hotel suite, with a sitting room, bedroom, full bath and shower, in-room entertainment, a direct virtual reality link for really going where you otherwise couldn’t and experiencing things you might not otherwise experience, and all the rest. There was even an octagonal window showing the immediate complex, although the window was really a wall screen that connected to external ports. For most of the trip it would be a mirror, and more useful for it.
The bottom line was, passenger travel in the age of interstellar civilizations did what passenger services always did in times past: it provided as many ways as economy and technology permitted to kill time and give you the illusion that you weren’t just sitting around bored.
Angel looked back at the cabin door and saw a display over it. Right now it was counting down toward 00:00:00, the time of departure, after which it would reset to the days, hours, and minutes until docking at the next stop.
It was all so new to her, and so wonderful. She’d seen most of the technology, of course, but she’d never dreamed of this level of luxury travel. She only wished that some friends or family were here to enjoy it with her. That, however, couldn’t be, and was the one real drag on an otherwise wondrous journey that she nonetheless knew she’d remember the rest of her life.
There was still almost an hour until departure. She decided to shower and freshen up and put on something lightweight and comfortable, then explore the module. It was, after all, going to be home for quite a while.
She saw a glowing red light on her desk console, and, realizing it was a message alert, pressed it.
“Captain Melak Dukodny of the City of Modar speaking to all guests,” came a pleasant if slightly stiff voice. “I welcome everyone who is joining us on this leg of our journey and invite you all to a reception in the main lounge. The reception will begin fifteen minutes before departure, but you may come down at any time after that, and I will join you shortly after we make the jump into null-space. Since this is a Junction board, none of you will be experiencing this for the first time, and I anticipate nothing you haven’t seen, heard, or felt before. Dinner will be served beginning one hour after jump, although, of course, you may order anything at any time from room service. At 2200 ship’s time tonight there will be a general talk in the lounge of all of the features available in your module, as well as information in case of emergencies. All passengers who have not attended a briefing aboard this ship are required to attend. Thank you, have a pleasant trip, and I hope to greet each and every one of you later this evening.”
The red light went out.
It sounded like a full evening. Well, if she was going to shower and change and still go through it all, she’d better get started, she decided.
She was startled to see that all of her clothing and toiletries had been unpacked and placed in drawers, closets, and the like. On the Queen of Tyre they’d just dumped the bags outside the door. There was even a ship’s clothing dispenser where you could get a basic utilitarian throwaway, loosely fitted, in case you didn’t want to mess anything up, but for social nights that was unthinkable.
It hadn’t occurred to her that this module had come in with the ship from someplace else and that there might be continuing passengers. So it might well mean more people, and even more races. She wondered just how many were aboard.
The lounge was more crowded than she’d anticipated. It was a very pleasant rounded and sunken space in the center of the mod, and with a nicely done but somewhat schizophrenic layout providing comfortable seats for all the races aboard, and indented areas along the curved walls offering various hors d’oeuvres carefully selected as delicacies for various races while being inoffensive-looking to others. The latter wasn’t always possible, but this company clearly knew its business.
Likewise, there were different drinks tailored to the racial makeups, and in the correct proportions and containers. It wasn’t that hard; all food and drink aboard was actually created by small energy-to-matter converters using various authentic programs supplied by chefs of the various races. In fact, all of them were really eating and drinking the garbage, but it had been nicely reprocessed and one just didn’t think of that.
Angel Kobe had been born and raised on a vast farm that used none of this technology, and its farmers only feared the widespread discovery of cheap and easy ways to do the synthesizing on a mass scale. Fortunately, it was expensive and high maintenance, and was only possible on spacecraft as a by-product of the life support and propulsion systems.
Although she was in her fanciest evening clothes, she felt much the ugly duckling among the Terrans present. Her feeling of glamour when she’d dressed and made up in the cabin and examined herself in the mirror completely faded when she saw the competition. She would have been the belle of the ball back home, but in this company she was the rube at the prince’s ball. These people wore elegance like a comfortable pair of shoes.
Worse, she felt conspicuously… well, alone. Most of the others seemed to be in pairs or small groups. It seemed she was the only single person on the ship.
No, that wasn’t true, but the other one hadn’t shown up yet. Oddly, she almost wished that Jeremiah Kincaid would show up. Once he entered the room, nobody but nobody, would even remember that she existed.
What had begun as an exciting taste of unaccustomed luxury had already turned into a miserable and lonely time, and she knew there was a long time to go yet.
There was a countdown clock in almost every public area, and, as if tuned into her thoughts, it reached all zeros. Almost immediately a vibration ran through the entire module, and she felt momentary dizziness caused by the switch to internal power and ship’s versus station gravity. At the same time, the circular ceiling became a viewing screen showing the disengagement from the large space station. Angel took a glass of juice, sat down on one of the comfortable recliner chairs, and settled back to watch it. If she was going to be the rube anyway, she decided, she might as well do what she felt like doing.
The grand, kilometers-long space station and freight yard looked utilitarian and not at all glamorous from the outside.
It was big, though; a lot bigger than even she had thought. The freighter she’d come in on hadn’t had this kind of view. She was surprised to see, for instance, that the module was not actually part of the ship, and that the actual City of Modar wasn’t docked at all. It sat in a parking orbit off the station, along with a number of other ships, and was mostly engine and fuel containers. It looked like nothing anyone without knowledge of the system would expect; a gigantic cylindrical mass with huge ramjetlike scoops flanking it all around except right on “top,” where there was a large whale-shaped bulge and rows of lights around it. The rear area had a series of large steering jets arranged around a central yellowish core that seemed to pulse regularly. Forward, a seemingly endless row of modules almost the size of the ship itself were connected one to the other like children’s building blocks. All of them were basically contoured octagons, but the eight surfaces surrounded a cylindrical core. How long the train of modules went on, she couldn’t guess; it was longer than the vast space station she’d just left, that was for sure.