Letting my eyes drift to a random part of the large parabolic window in front of me, common courtesy in this day and age, i blink hard once to trigger the optical nerve override. All goes dark for a heartbeat and then my vision is replaced with text, icons and graphs. With a quick tapping pattern i issue commands to my inbuilt operator via the actuation of certain muscles in my wrists and hands i bring up the local stations registrar board, in essence just the universal contracts board issued and maintained by The Eye. Local boards however, are of course not subject to the omnipresent light delay making them the best source for short notice contracts and those are of course the most lucrative ones. No sense in taking low pay when you are the only available option.

However luck was not on my side and apart from the standards additions of low fare, low speed cargo drops nothing tickled the optical nerve the right way.

Chuckling to myself i ping a few local ports of my favourite food and drink places checking for availability, prices and inventory. What was i expecting, any job worth the fuel would probably have a pilot on retainer but that’s the cost of doing businesses if you want some freedom or have something to hide, both being of significant importance to me. And bingo, the cheap chain of NAT cultural food had some actual arctic raspberry tea in stock, 138.7% market price but still.

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With a hard blink of my eyes the override is disabled and the view of the world is returned to my brain, in all honesty a beautiful sight. The concourse windows look out of the station down to the jovian below, illuminated by the local O-type star as the stations follows it’s orbit along the terminator line, always in the light, allowing for maximum power for the station, a requirement since the probability of two people being on the same day/night cycle or even the same day/night interval is almost nil.

Taking a deep breath to give that little extra percentage of oxygen and hydrogen from the air to the reactor in my abdominal cavity i get to my feet with a soft groan, an inevitability for anyone who often performs high intensity gravity assists.

The concourse is a stark mix of white polymers and large swaths of green… things. Plants, it’s plants, but not any old planet bound ones, no instead it’s some sort of algae thing that floats around in tanks of high density, high humidity gas, maximising growth while still keeping the station clean and free of unnecessary bio material in the main atmosphere areas. Oxygen, veggies and decoration, all in one neat and tidy package. The tastefulness is highly debatable but it’s certainly functional.