Throttle Twenty-Seven

There wasn’t a welcoming committee waiting for them at the end of the airlock. Instead, the airlock led into a long corridor with handholds all along the rim, only broken up by other airlocks. The passage wasn’t straight either. It was clear that it bent all around the honeycomb maze of landing pads.

Diana floated out across the room from her airlock, took note of the number above it in case she got lost, then she flipped herself around so that she hit the opposite wall feet-first, knees bending to absorb the slight impact and to arrest her momentum. She hooked a foot in one of the handholds, just in case.

ChaOS didn’t move with any such grace. The robot stayed upright, gently sliding across the corridor until the jets along his frame spurted and spat, and he stopped in the centre.

“So, which way to the fun stuff?” Diana asked.

ChaOS pointed to his left. “That way leads to a commercial district. There are stores, depots, repair and maintenance services, and yes, several bars.”

“Well then, let’s go!” Diana said.

She tugged herself towards the wall, bent one leg up until her knee rested under her chin, and with a grunt of effort, shoved herself off the wall.

ChaOS puffed after her, feet skimming just barely above the ‘floor’ of the corridor.

Diana had spent her fair share of time in zero-g. The trick was to decide which way was ‘down.’ Otherwise it became incredibly easy to lose track of directions. It could be easy enough to lose one’s north sometimes. In zero-g, the possible directions to get lost in grew exponentially.

She flew ahead to the next intersection, then tested the jets on her armour to see how much control she had over her flight. It wasn’t spectacular, but she could change direction, slow down, and spin around all six axes. “These thrusters are a bit anaemic,” she complained while waiting for ChaOS to catch up.

“That is on purpose, Mistress.”

“What?” she asked.

“If I gave you more powerful thrusters, you would use them to race ahead. I cannot keep up without extensive modifications to my frame, modifications that would necessarily make it less capable. Therefore, the easiest solution to keeping up with you is to hamper your own mobility.”

Diana gasped. “You’re horrible.”

“I am pragmatic, and you are predictable. This is merely the obvious meeting of the two.” The robot flew smugly past Diana, who hung onto a bar on the ‘ceiling’. “Besides, while it is statistically unlikely that you would need the additional speed that greater thrusters would bring, the likelihood of you ploughing into a bulkhead at lethal speeds is exceedingly high.”

“You say that, but I bet I’d want them anyway.”

They reached a large doorway at the end of one corridor, with padded walls all around and a keypad on the ‘floor’ of it.

Diana swung down towards the keypad and grabbed onto the rails next to it, feet floating up behind her. “Uh,” she said as she scanned the device. It had a few options that her translation software was working on deciphering. The translated text was overlaid atop the buttons, but not all of the text fit within the same confines. It didn’t take much to find the ‘open’ option though.

“The text is in traditional polerin,” ChaOS said. “The written part of that language is iconographic.”

“That’s neat,” Diana said while the doorway slid open. It led into another airlock, one whose far door was made of some glass-like material. She could see a busy street past that, though the semi-opaque glass made it hard to see any details.

The pair waited until the airlock cycled, then the door slid open and Diana took in the true interior of Waitless station.

The corridor was square, with a street above and below where trams on rails moved past, frequently with a dozen or more boxes behind them. Big tubes on the sides allowed all sorts of aliens to float along the street, and the occasional padded gap in the glass tunnels allowed those who wanted to leave or to cross the street some place to move from.

Shopfronts lined the upper and lower edges of the box, most with signs that were only upright if you were looking up towards them.

“Wait, they have two floors?” Diana asked as she took it all in.

The top and bottom of the passageway both acted as a sort of ‘down’, at least if the way the signs all over were meant to be read meant anything. There seemed to be two flows of foot (or float) traffic too, always moving forwards on the right side and back on the left. It was a bit of a mess to wrap her head around initially, but a bit of observation let her figure it out.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Alright,” she said. “So, where’s the bar?”

“The nearest should be two street corners from here. Though from the reviews on the interactive map I’ve downloaded, it seems as though it’s a somewhat seedy and disreputable place.”

Diana turned towards him. “Did you think I was looking for a nice clean place?”

“No, but even an AI is allowed to hope.”

Diana flew over to the nearest tunnel and grabbed onto a padded loop on the inside. She let go as soon as she felt how sticky it was. “Oh, that’s gross, don’t they clean these things?” she asked.

The station wasn’t dirty, but it wasn’t exactly impeccable either. The place had some clear signs of wear and tear. It was comfortably lived in. That didn’t excuse dirty handrails, in Diana’s opinion.

“How many people touch these things every day? This is just asking to get people sick.” She rubbed her hand off against her outer thigh to get the stick off.

“Extrapolating from the number of people visible now as well as the expected traffic at this hour, likely three to four hundred appendages touch most handrails every Earth day.”

“Thanks, I really needed to know that,” Diana said.

“You literally asked.”

She sniffed as she pushed herself along. The traffic around her wasn’t moving at Diana’s pace, but owing to the fact that the aliens around her were all floating freely down the tubes, it was easy to skirt around them and bounce off the walls to squeak past between two slower aliens. She wasn’t the only one moving faster either, though that might have been because some aliens were just terribly slow.

Mostly those were the strange bulbous borel sort who moved with all the speed Diana would expect from a sentient mushroom.

“Where do I turn?” Diana asked as she reached an intersection. She glanced back, then rolled her eyes. ChaOS was carefully moving along, keeping to the middle of the path and moving at the same speed as the rest of the crowd. “Really?”

“You could move on ahead of me, mistress,” ChaOS spoke into her augs.

“And leave you behind? That’d be a bit cold,” Diana said. “I’m not the nicest person around, but I won’t just abandon you. Besides, I need you to bail me out when I get in trouble.”

“I dislike the certainty in that statement.”

“It is certainty based on prior experience,” Diana said. She grinned as the robot finally caught up. “So, where to?”

“Right there, mistress. That opening on the ground level is the Little Mercies. It’s the local equivalent of a bar.”

Diana turned, squinting as she searched for the bar. It was a little hole in the wall, almost literally. The far wall was made of the grey stone that made up the asteroid’s surface; it even had some cutting marks still visible from where the tunnel had been bored. In that wall was a little entrance surrounded by bright lights and flashing advertisements.

They’d made it difficult to make out the interior, which seemed much darker and was filled with big bubbles of smoke slowly being sucked away by a tepid ventilation system.

Diana moved ahead a little, then waited for ChaOS at the next hole in the tube where they could exit to cross the road.

She was about to complain to ChaOS when an alarm dragged her attention down the road.

A tram was moving by at a decent clip, and behind it a pair of what she assumed were security officers were using thruster packs not dissimilar to diving pods to speed down the road.

They were chasing a group of six or so younger aliens. The group were shooting by, skimming past walls and kicking off posts and railing. The occasional burst of gas behind them gave the aliens a boost.

They shot past Diana’s position, making noises that she translated to laughter. The two security aliens roared after them, sirens blaring.

“No, Mistress.”

“Oh come on,” Diana said. “That’s clearly a race.”

“Perhaps, but it is also clearly one that has started already. Besides, you don’t know that it truly is a race.”

“Oh, I know it is,” she said as she watched the group zip around a bend at breakneck speeds.

***