Chapter 90: Driftmark Station [II]

Driftmark hit them like a physical wave.

The air reached Elena first... It was warm and faintly humid as it carried a heavy metallic tang that tasted of hot iron filings, sulfurous smelter runoff and cheap hydraulic grease, threaded through with a spicy organic musk like scorched pepper and fermented algae.

Then came the noise.

It was deafening.

The habitat ring was a vast hollow cylinder of corrugated grey titanium and rough-hewn basalt, and it echoed with the endless multi-ton rumble of refinery centrifuges, the thud of ore compactors, the sharp hiss of plasma cutters and the chaotic overlapping babble of a thousand voices speaking in clicks, grunts, melodic chimes and the squawk of digital translators.

The gravity was a touch lighter than Earth’s, and it put a strange buoyant spring into Elena’s calves that made her place every step with exaggerated care so she wouldn’t look clumsy.

"Holy... hell..." Harper breathed, right behind her shoulder.

The concourse was packed with hundreds of living beings moving in broad chaotic currents between steel bulkheads, modular supply shops and overhead gantry cranes hauling glowing bins of crushed ore.

Three huge beings strode past the gate, two and a half meters tall at the shoulder.

They walked on four thick legs like a draft horse and carried their upright torsos high above them, and they used their two heavy arms to haul chains attached to sleds of raw tungsten.

Their hunched backs were armored in craggy dark green plates that looked like chipped basalt, and their flat snouts vented thin wisps of steam through slits along the side.

Jin-Ah’s slate chimed and tagged them in a neat line of text.

[Vorn]

Smaller insectoid creatures with six jointed limbs and iridescent copper shells skittered between the Vorn’s feet.

They wore goggles with rotating lenses over their compound eyes, and their delicate mandibles clicked in rapid-fire conversation as they traded micro-circuits out of pouches strapped to their thoraxes.

Along the upper catwalks drifted tall slender beings with translucent blue skin, so clear that their glowing circulatory tracts showed through in the dim yellow light of the sodium strips.

...They moved with an eerie floating grace, and their four elongated eyes blinked independently as they watched the crowd below with cold detachment.

A faint shiver ran down Elena’s arms.

She kept her chin up and her hands resting calmly at her belt, but her knuckles had gone white where her fingers pressed together.

Her mind was running at full overdrive, cataloging every movement, every anatomical variation and every possible threat, trying to make up for the overwhelming strangeness of it all.

"Elena..." a warm low voice murmured beside her ear.

She jumped... Her poise cracked for a fraction of a second before she caught it and turned her head.

Leo was right beside her, his broad shoulder brushing hers.

He looked out at the green-plated giants and the clicking insectoid traders with calm curiosity and a relaxed smirk on his lips, and he’d clearly noticed every bit of the tension in her posture.

"Breathe, Princess," he teased, leaning in just enough that only she could hear over the din. "They won’t bite, well unless you insult their ore."

A traitorous warmth flared in Elena’s cheeks.

She shot him a haughty sidelong look and raised her chin another fraction to restore her pride.

"I’m breathing perfectly well, Captain," she murmured back, clipped and aristocratic, though the knot in her stomach had loosened considerably the moment he’d spoken. "I’m conducting a preliminary sociological assessment... One must stay vigilant among beings whose biology is undocumented."

"Right. Very vigilant," Leo chuckled, his eyes crinkling, and gave her upper arm a brief reassuring squeeze. "Just don’t squeeze your knuckles so hard they snap... You’ll need those hands to count our Zuni."

Elena huffed and smoothed her lapels, though she deliberately stepped a few centimeters closer to his side as they moved into the main concourse.

Behind them, the rest of the crew was reacting in their own very different ways.

Chloe was fixed to Leo’s left side like an immovable shadow.

She’d pulled her sleeves down over her hands and her bangs hung low over her forehead, and her small boots matched his stride step for step.

Her eyes darted from one alien face to the next with a quiet stillness that held no fear whatsoever.

To her, the towering Vorn and the clicking insectoids were simply large moving bags of blood, and they’d better not come within sixty centimeters of her captain...

Twice a heavy miner brushed too close in the press.

Both times, her small sleeved hand came to rest on Leo’s forearm, and she looked up at his face and took one long slow breath, exactly as he’d told her to.

The tiny speck of crimson blooming in her pupils faded back to green before anyone else could have seen it.

The second time, Leo rested his hand on the top of her head for a moment without looking down, and she leaned into it like a cat.

Camila, on the other hand, was practically vibrating with wonder.

She carried her sample crate of tomatoes in both arms, her bronze cheeks flushed pink, and her eyes were glued to the strange tiered fungi and alien flowers displayed in the window of an apothecary stall along the wall.

"Leo, look!" she gasped, tugging at the back of his shirt with one free hand and pointing at a vendor whose skin looked like wet river moss. "Those purple spores are suspended in liquid nitrogen, and they’re glowing on their own...! Do you think they’d cross-pollinate with our root crops? The nitrogen fixing alone could double the harvest!"

"We’re here to sell food, Camila, not turn the garden into an alien jungle," Leo laughed, shaking his head at her fondly. "Though if you find anything that tastes like garlic, buy the whole crate..."

"I’ll look!" Camila beamed, her eyes dancing with pure joy and completely unbothered by the fanged giants walking past her.

As they passed the apothecary, a figure peeled away from the shadow beside its door, and Chloe’s eyes went to it at once.

It was small for this place, barely taller than Camila, wrapped in a filthy leather tunic with a hood pulled low.

Under the hood was a narrow twitching snout, two glassy black eyes and a fringe of greasy grey whiskers that quivered constantly, testing the air.

It moved through the crowd with the boneless ease of something that had spent its whole life slipping between bigger bodies, and for twenty paces it drifted along behind them on the far side of the walkway with its glassy eyes fixed on the crate in Camila’s arms then it slid sideways behind a cargo stack and was gone.

Chloe watched the place where it had disappeared.

Her nostrils flared once and she filed the smell away since it was so strange... it was like milk left out in the sun however she kept quiet.

Leo had told her to breathe, and talking hadn’t been part of the instructions.

She moved a little closer to Camila instead, until her shoulder was brushing the edge of the tomato crate, and Camila glanced down at her and smiled, thinking she wanted to smell the tomatoes again.

’I’ll let her think so...’

Harper was a disaster of distracted enthusiasm.

She walked with her thumbs hooked in the waistband of her cargo trousers and her head swiveling on her neck like a broken radar dish.

Every time they passed an open repair bay or an armory stall, she stopped dead and pressed her face to the security grate with wide star-struck eyes.

"Holy crap, look at that plasma torch!" she yelled, pointing across the walkway at a hulking Vorn welding an iron strut onto an ore skiff with surprising delicacy for something with hands the size of shovels. "That’s a dual-stage magnetic induction nozzle! And that gunboat over there... is that a rotary cannon on a hydraulic pintle?! That thing’s gotta dump forty rounds a second! I want to see how they balance the recoil!"

"Harper, keep moving," Aoi said sharply, in the voice of a lecturer herding a class of first-years off a field trip.

Aoi walked with her hands lightly clasped in front of her and her navy tunic spotless, her glasses catching the glare of the sodium lights. Her eyes never stopped moving.

She tracked the station security guards in their pressurized ceramic chestplates with stun-pikes on their shoulders, and she quietly noted the nearest bulkheads in case of a sudden decompression.

"Maintain formation," she said, tapping Harper’s shoulder with the edge of her slate. "We’re in an unaligned port with no legal protection... Don’t gawk at their weapons, and don’t agitate the workforce."

"I’m not gawking, I’m admiring the craftsmanship!" Harper protested, but she jogged two steps to fall back into line and threw a conspiratorial wink at Leo. "...You’ll let me buy a new plasma tip if we make enough, right, Cap? A little one?"

"Only if you promise not to blow up the lathe again," Leo said.

"That was a containment failure and you know it!"

Jin-Ah, meanwhile, had vanished completely into her own world of data.

She walked with her slate held flat in both hands and its camera sensors flickering, recording every holographic billboard, every trade manifest in every storefront and every directional sign written in jagged angular glyphs, and feeding all of it into her translator.

"The Guild’s trade language is a creole built on thirty-two planetary dialects..." she reported in a calm voice, walking at Aoi’s elbow. "The exchange terminals along this concourse take an eight percent fee on unverified credit chips, but physical bullion and standard ingots are exempt from local exchange tax... Pressing our salvage into standard bars saves us roughly five hundred Zuni in processing fees."

"Smart girl," Leo said over his shoulder.

Jin-Ah looked up from her screen.

A faint pleased warmth touched her pale cheeks and her chin lifted a fraction, and then she went straight back to logging market prices as if nothing had happened.

The concourse widened as they went, and the titanium walls gave way to raw exposed asteroid rock.

The low ceiling opened upward into a cavernous transit hub where three main walkways met, and the air grew thicker and hotter, full of the chanting of street hawkers, the sizzle of alien food roasting over induction grills and the vibrant pulse of thousands of beings crammed into a single hollowed-out chamber.

Camila’s stomach growled loudly at a stall where something long and pink and segmented was turning on a spit, dripping fat that hissed and smoked on the coals.

Harper leaned toward it hungrily, then caught sight of the vendor, a cheerful insectoid who was happily crunching through one of the same long pink things raw, and leaned back out again.

"Nope," she said. "Nope, I’m good... Camila, you’re cooking tonight."

Camila laughed and promised her potatoes, roasted with salt and the last of the rosemary.

They followed the directional arrows toward the central sector and the Grand Bazaar of Driftmark.

The path ran through a reinforced blast portal five meters wide, cut straight through an ancient vein of glittering quartz-flecked iron ore.

Leo stepped through the arch first, with Elena on his right and Chloe on his left, while Harper, Camila, Aoi and Jin-Ah crowded close behind his shoulders.

...The Grand Bazaar was a breathtaking cavern carved directly into the living heart of the asteroid.

The ceiling arched fifty meters overhead, crisscrossed with lit catwalks, transport cables and clusters of amber lanterns that poured warm golden light down across hundreds of tiered stalls.

Stalls built from raw stone and salvaged starship bulkheads wound across the cavern floor in long avenues, heaped with crystalline ores, shimmering barrels of unrefined fuel, racks of custom kinetic weapons, stacks of void-beast hides and crates of glowing components from a dozen different systems.

Haggling prospectors, mercenary crews and guild brokers filled the place with a roaring clamor of commerce then, along the main avenue, the noise began to die.

It started with a towering Vorn miner who’d been arguing over the price of a plasma coil at the nearest salvage stall.

He stopped in mid-sentence, his three rows of amber eyes blinking slowly in disbelief, and turned his heavy snout toward the entrance.

Beside him, two insectoid technicians stopped clicking, and their lenses spun with a flurry of tiny mechanical whirs as they focused on the portal.

A blue-skinned merchant lowered his data pad.

A pair of scarred avian mercenaries with feathered crests froze with their hands resting on their holstered sidearms, and an entire row of miners, haulers and guild clerks fell silent at their counters.

The silence rippled outward through the crowded avenue like a shockwave.

Every head in the nearest row turned, and hundreds of eyes locked onto the entrance... compound lenses, glowing yellow slits, luminous blue orbs and dark predatory pupils.

They stared at the six young human women in their clean tailored clothes, and at the broad-shouldered, long-haired young man standing tall and completely unbothered in the middle of them.