Day 0 - Ialis
Miles watched Trin and Torg through the viewport of the shuttle’s passenger deck. The pair of them shrank slowly as the shuttle gained altitude, Trin becoming a blur, and then pink-white dot. Torg vanished against the backdrop of the black-green moss. Soon, he couldn’t see them at all.
The sky shuttle to Consular City was just the first short leg of his journey, but it was his start. Miles felt the mixed pain and excitement of leaving home, even for just a few weeks.
His luggage hovered next to him. He’d turned his dungeon alloy shield so it was face down, and in that position it worked pretty well as a cargo sled. It was burdened with the runner’s pack he’d left Earth with, his rolled sleeping bag, and a synth fabric duffel pack that held the rest of his gear.
There was no checked luggage on the sky shuttle, and from what Miles had heard, it’d be the same on the Century Express. People traveled with their things in the same cabin as them. Even weapons. Even bottled water. The arrangement was closer to the sleeper trains of ancient Earth than an intercontinental flight.
He'd kept the dagger and hammer that the metalworker had turned his Ymn door scraps into, now packed away in his bag, with the rest of the pieces resold back to the Ialis Corporation. The price the Gilthaens offered had gone down a little from their first offer, but not by as much as he’d expected. He'd still made over a thousand seln on the pieces. If he'd had time to shop for a viable replacement, then even holding on to the shield would have been a tough decision.
As the minutes passed, Miles resisted the urge to hop up and sit on the shield. He was sure that as soon as he did, the shuttle would change acceleration and he’d find himself drifting off in one direction or the other.
Instead, he held onto his luggage with one hand, the metal ceiling loops with the other, and tried to zone out while looking at the scenery below. It wasn’t that different to riding on the subway.
***
The transfer from the shuttle to the docking platform for the Century Express had been rushed and hectic.
Consular City was enormous, built in a completely different style from Dendril City. Miles recognized the Gilthaen style in the structures. Tiered pagodas, many open to the air, but just as many walled off with thin translucent screens.
Unlike the towers of Dendril City, at least half the buildings in Consular City were levitating, supported by a combination of massive levitation units and attraction beams from anchoring stations higher up. The effect was as if the entire city was in the process of falling upwards, buildings spaced out along a kilometer-high column of air.
The inter-city shuttle had landed at one of the ground-based landing platforms, but the Century Express left from one of the topmost floating pagodas, and the need to change platforms wasn’t made particularly clear to anyone arriving at the skydock.
It had been a tight connection from the arrival platform to the point of departure, traveling on an open-air transport platform, but Miles had made it with a few minutes to spare.
Now, he waited on the roof of one of the topmost pagodas, surrounded by forty or so Ialis sapients. The floating building was so high they were sharing space with the clouds, with the cold damp air turning to mist a few meters past the edge of the building.
Miles didn’t recognize most of the other people on the platform as dungeon divers. He wasn’t an expert on spiral clothing yet, but all of the sapients present had outfits that seemed to fit the category of business wear or high fashion. Suits with non-functional embellishments, fits that would limit movement, fabrics that shone, or changed color holographically, none of which pointed to a pragmatic function.
He didn’t need to be a follower of spiral fashion to know an ankle-length coat with a six-inch popped collar probably wasn’t the outfit you’d wear on a dungeon dive.
Miles thought he visibly stood out from the business crowd. He was dressed in his tailored off-white robe and brown webbing belt, covered in pouches, with the black pants, white shirt, and warm dark red jerkin underneath.
The blue ‘healer’ symbol dyed on the chest of his robe probably labeled him as a scavenger to everyone present, even if they didn’t recognize that his robe was made of armored fabric.
With the time Miles had taken to reach the platform, he didn’t have to watch the other passengers.
It came out of the clouds above him like a sea monster rising out of the murky ocean. An enormous bulbous whale of a vessel, half a kilometer long, studded by lights, scabbed with irregularly sized viewports, humming like a live wire as it came down through the mist.
Miles thought that the ship might be an Alfaen design, like the Starlit Kipper. It had the same kind of organic curves, evoking an aquatic creature.
It seemed a little extreme to be bringing the entire passenger liner into the atmosphere, let alone into a force gradient like the pseudo-gravity around Ialis. Miles thought it would have been infinitely easier to send a shuttle down to make the passenger transfer while keeping the main ship in orbit, but he wasn’t the one paying its fuel costs.
The ship came down much lower than Miles was comfortable with. It reached a hundred feet from the platform and kept on coming. It didn’t stop at fifty feet, or at twenty feet. He had a moment of panic when it looked like the ship was going to crash into the platform, but its speed dropped sharply at the last second, and it came to a stop just ten feet above the heads of the waiting passengers.
A cylindrical cut-out of the ship’s belly descended on a telescoping piston, revealing a circular platform that was bounded by railings and packed with disembarking passengers.
The disk touched the building’s roof, and the sapients leaving the ship flooded out through narrow gates.
When the space was clear, the waiting passengers surged forward onto the platform.
***
> Century Express Passenger Liaison System > Miles Asher
>
> Welcome on board the Century Express.
>
> As an Independent passenger, you are granted full access to public areas of the ship.
>
> Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
>
> You are granted habitation rights in any of our species-agnostic life support suites on decks E and D.
>
> Nutritional packs, atmospheric top-ups, in-flight entertainment, and souvenirs can be purchased at our commercial facility on Deck E1.
>
> Please consult the attached data pack or any ship data panel for information on our bylaws and conditions of carriage.
>
> Informational briefs will be delivered for each of our destinations for your benefit and enjoyment.
>
> If you have any questions or wish to make a report, this automated system will be happy to help.
Being an Independent ticket holder put Miles on almost the bottom rung of passengers. He was allowed on board the ship, but he had no assigned quarters, no free meals, and no automatic right to access the utilities.
He did have access to a suite he’d have to share with up to twenty other sapients, assuming they weren’t all full.
He went straight for one of the furthest suites in and was the first passenger to find it.
The ‘suite’ didn’t look too bad.
There were sealed-off chambers at one end for waste and washing, with the rest of the space taken up by padded benches.
A soft, padded surface was an almost universal comfort amenity from what Miles had seen. Any species with hard body parts, internal or external, would welcome a place to put themself down that distributed the force over an area rather than a single point. Even Alan, the Welven that Miles had met in the mage’s enclave, had been using a cushion when he was meditating in egg form.
The far wall of the space was completely given over to viewports, though currently they only showed an impenetrable wall of Ialis mist.
Miles picked a bench close to the windows and sat down, moving his shield to stand upright in an out-of-the-way spot in the corner.
Still too unsettled to read, he settled down to wait.
The first other passenger to arrive was a Welven, or rather, four Welven of different colors tessellated together to make an even larger flat square.
Miles hadn’t knowingly seen any sapient children during his time in the spiral, neither Ialis or Delatariel Station had seemed like the place for them, but he was convinced that the half dozen coaster-sized Welven following the larger square were infants of their species. They wriggled along the floor on their shag-rug undersides, following their larger guardian around the corner and into the room.
The tessellated adults picked out a bench for them near the window, and the infants crawled up the sides to sit across the cushion, straining their eyestalks to peer up through the glass.
Miles watched them get situated. Half a minute after he turned his attention on them, he started to hear tiny voices coming from the crowd.
“Fa, what alien is that?”
“Fa! I have to freum!”
“Fa. I am itchy!”
“Fa! Fa! Fa! Fa!”
The voices were all quiet and high-pitched.
Miles closed his eyes, hoping the translation magic would fade without his attention on them.
Passengers continued to filter in over the next few minutes. By the time Miles’ comm started beeping with the ship’s embarkation message, there were fifteen other sapients in the compartment. Ten of them were the Welven family, plus a rocky coral-like sapient, two Hurc travelers, a Morchis traveler whose hood was so deep their face was lost in shadow, and a Draulean.
Miles hadn't seen a Draulean since Lestiel Dunverde, the first client they'd guided into the dungeon. For some reason, he was surprised to see this one traveling in the public suites. Maybe he thought that because their species was supposedly immortal they were all rich.
This individual had the same skin effect as Lestiel, alternately ink black and alabaster white depending on whether an area was more in light or shadow, but they had a taller, narrower build, and where Lestiel had a smooth bald head, this individual’s scalp was textured with raised fractals.
They stood apart from the rest of the passengers, staring out through the viewport.
Miles let Eyes of the Emigre fade to bring Eyes of the Altruist to the front of his awareness.
A quick check of the Draulean passenger confirmed that they had the same unusual internal structure as Lestiel. No organs at all, except for the large shape in their torso, positioned like a mouth on its side.
A couple of minutes after the last passenger entered, the bulkheads of the ship thrummed like a struck bell and the world outside became tinted with the blue of the ship’s shields. There was a minor sense of movement and some swirling in the mist outside.
Soon, the mist was vanishing, giving way to clear skies, and a clear view over the surface of Ialis. The curve of the planet became obvious as the sky turned black, and the ship turned away from the planet to begin its journey.
The rocky cone of a sapient sitting next to Miles struck up a conversation with him once the planet was out on view.
Thanks to his recent studies, Miles recognized them as being a member of a species called Endurers, which had to be a rare case of a species name being translated semantically rather than phonetically.
They introduced themselves as Stringer, a Euphospher drive technician on their way back from a shipyard contract in Iteration 26,899.
It took a few minutes of Stringer describing the world before Miles realized they were actually talking about Torg’s homeworld.
The sapient reported an unstable political situation in the iteration, and a civil war that had left a lot of weave ships damaged. Things were calmer now, and the spiral had lifted the political embargo, so there was apparently a lot of new work for people in technical fields.
Miles found himself explaining his own job. Stringer was fascinated that Miles was an Ialis scavenger, and even encouraged him to tell some of his dive stories.
Over the course of a half hour, Miles recounted his fight in the cobolt ravine and then his encounter with the Orbellius ghouls. He kept the Ymn city environ encounter to himself, worried that he’d lose his credibility with the stranger if he started talking about the weirder parts of it. It was probably the kind of account that Fran would call a ‘ghost story’.
After that, they each found they’d reached the limit of small-talk and fell into silence. Stringer pulled out a featureless cube which they began manipulating with their tendrils, while Miles grabbed a book from his bag.
There was no day-night cycle on the ship, but after a few hours of quiet reading, Miles began feeling a little stretched.
He wasn’t exactly tired. He’d been awake for about eighteen hours and felt like he could go longer, but the stress of packing and travel took its own kind of toll, and his body was worn out, even if his mind wasn’t.
When it came to sleep, the passenger suite had the feel of an airport lobby. It wasn’t somewhere Miles felt completely comfortable sleeping, exposed and in the company of strangers, but it occupied the weird middle ground where someone could sleep out of necessity without looking out of place.
He found a power port for his levitation unit and set up his sleeping bag on the bench, with his bigger backpack arranged as a pillow and his rain cloak on standby as an additional blanket. He positioned his shield so that it was floating on its side between him and the room, giving him a little cover and the illusion of privacy.
He thought he’d have trouble sleeping, but as he began to drowse, he felt like he was back in the refugee housing of Unsiel Station, where quarters were cramped and everyone was in the same situation together.
Before he had a chance to worry about whether his possessions would be safe, or if he could trust the other passengers, he was already drifting off into troubled sleep.