The central shaft of Point Pleasant was a thousand stories tall, and those stories got more sordid the further down you went.
Every level was like a circular city block, with storefronts and apartments and office complexes built into the space station's outer hull. A fifty-foot-wide pedestrian walkway ringed their facades. In the middle, the giant open-air shaft, three hundred feet in diameter, stretched from the power plant at the very bottom of the station all the way up to the dome at the top.
The lights and surfaces were shades of blue, like the supergiant star outside. However, unlike the baby blue hues shining from the top of the shaft — where rich people lived and shopped — the slum levels were darkened by heavy layers of dirt, disrepair, and disrespect.
Luci braced herself as she stepped through the front door and onto the pedestrian walkway. Behind her, the door's timer ran out and it slid shut, cutting off her escape route. The door had a large glass window, but at some point the office complex's previous owners had welded plate steel over it. The outside intrapanel was caged up to prevent it from being stolen, and it was a giant pain in the ass to wriggle your fingers through the bars to get at its touchscreen. She suspected a security camera used to hang in the doorway's corner, allowing them to see who was outside, but the only thing left of it was a discolored patch of wall and a tiny hole for wires to poke through. The thieves had even stripped the cables out of the wall.
The sign over the door was blank. Kestrel Mining had no need to advertise themselves right now.
She looked to the left.
Two spindly Buelbubbs with pebbled lizard skin, drooping floppy ears, and long, crocodile-like snouts sat on a bench in front of an apartment complex. They passed a paper bag back and forth, taking turns sticking their snouts inside, huffing, and reeling from the high.
She looked to the right.
A human man pinned an upright tube of undulating jelly six feet tall against the huge diagonal beam holding up the walkway above. The man wore an expensive three-piece suit. The tube had a babydoll stretched around its midsection. In the secluded corner, the man — his belt and fly undone — thrust his hips into its quivering mass while grunting and muttering, "Aw, yeah, baby. Slime me, just like that." The tube trilled wetly from the orifice at its top end.
Just ignore it, Luci thought. Mind your own business.
She patted her cargo pants to make sure she had her wallet and her keystick, which'd let her get back into the office, and then crossed the walkway to the edge of the shaft. The giant opening yawned wide, but a railing and a glass partition with ventilation slats kept her from falling. She pressed an elevator call button on a pillar. It flashed '#63'. She circled the shaft to look for the indicated set of glass doors.
Luckily, the capsule arrived as soon as she got there. She breathed a sigh of relief that she didn't need to wait.
Un-luckily …
When the two glass doors slid open, a slug-like alien slithered out on its fat, legless body, leaving a trail of slime on the floor and — worse — all over the capsule.
And it smelled terrible.
Maldita sea! she thought as she gagged and fought to keep from vomiting. The things I do for you, Philomena …!
Once the alien had slithered away, Luci carefully stepped over the slime, pressed herself against the curved wall of the capsule, and edged sideways to the intrapanel mounted on the back. The capsule had glass walls, allowing her to see around the whole shaft and the other capsules whizzing along the shaft's edge. As implied by their name, they looked like pills going down a giant throat.
After wiping the screen off with her sleeve, she poked its onscreen keyboard and typed 'Stellar' into the search engine. The screen was still too sticky for her liking, but … not much she could do about that.
> Searching for 'Stellar' …
>
> Searching …
>
> Searching …
>
> Closest match: 'Steluubrious Svorx Juptani Shop'
Groaning, Luci typed 'Stellar beauty products' into the search engine.
> Searching for 'Stellar beauty products' …
>
> The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
>
> Searching …
>
> Searching …
>
> Closest match: 'Grashnox's Hyloomian Oiling Chambers'
She tapped the icon to display all search results and scrolled down the list, growing more self-conscious of the open door behind her, and how vulnerable she was. At last, she found the one she wanted halfway down the list. When she tapped it, the doors slid shut and the capsule got moving. Straddling the slime puddles on the floor and pinching her nose shut, she watched the levels zip by.
They say the search engine is programmed to make sure the people at the bottom of the shaft stay there, she thought. Well … I believe it.
The intrapanel switched over to #PointBreak, the station's internal bulletin system, which constantly cycled through algorithmically-curated status updates from the starnet. Due to both the time delay involved with interstellar communications and the decrepit state of the starnet's aging infrastructure, the starnet was limited to text and still images. Worldnets — especially on rich planets — were much more sophisticated, and capable of wonderful things like streaming video on demand. But people joked there was an invisible magnetic field out on the frontier that fried every piece of technology except for the ones that could accidentally blow you up, which seemed to work perfectly until they accidentally blew you up.
A status update popped onto the intrapanel's screen.
> Battle for #Calcephar heats up! @GoldenGuard advance thru snow and blaster fire, indie mercs scatter under bombardment. @GeoForceResourceSolutions reveals development plan to shareholders, dismiss criticism as #disinfo by rivals. Subscribe for updates. #MercenaryAction #PlanetWar
>
> -@TheGalacticHerald posted this on Tuesday. 20,471,853 liked this.
It was accompanied by an impressive-looking snapshot of a Starhammer fighter jet soaring over a snowy trench, dropping ordinance on the ragtag mercenaries huddling inside it. In the corner, some text credited the image to @SmirkingMerc71.
I wonder if he's still smirking after getting all those bombs dropped on him, Luci thought.
The government barred corporations from having their own armies, so they all had to hire mercenaries to fight their battles for them. In the galaxy, there were two types of mercenary — the large-scale, well-organized professional outfits like Sigma Force and Golden Guard, and the small-scale, unruly independent operators who took whatever work they found. The big outfits were disciplined and principled and usually didn't murder people indiscriminately. That made them a safer bet, PR-wise, for corporate clients on high-publicity jobs. Independent operators, on the other hand, were often used for unscrupulous dirty work on the frontier, where everybody looked the other way when a handful of innocent civilians got violently killed.
And sometimes, like on Calcephar, the two types of mercenary went head to head, and the independent operators got their asses handed to them.
Luci was vaguely aware some land baron scooped Calcephar up for cheap, then discovered it was actually really valuable. GeoForce invented a fake excuse about how they were owed for a business deal that fell through. The land baron refused to give it up and — unable to afford a professional outfit himself — hired a bunch of independent mercs to hold onto it.
Apparently, that plan was not working.
Luci tried not to think about it too much …
… because Kestrel Mining was technically GeoForce's competitor.
And they did not have very deep pockets.
As the elevator capsule ascended into the celestial blue light, it slowed down and then eased to a stop. The glass doors opened, allowing Luci to step out onto the pedestrian walkway at the station's midsection.
The people waiting for the capsule all recoiled from the stench.
"It was like that when I got on," she said, slipping sideways out of their view.
She strolled along the walkway, which buzzed with chit-chat from the shoppers walking past the facades' window displays. The floor was swept, the trash cans were regularly taken out, the greenery in the planters livened the place up. These levels, at the midsection, were home to the middle class.
Point Pleasant had been built to give the businesses developing the frontier a home base. A slice of urban life, at the outermost edge of civilization.
Although Luci's blue-collar clothing looked a little out of place, she didn't draw any nasty stares. Neither from the other pedestrians, nor from the station's security staff.
Nicknamed the 'Black & Blues', they wore light blue button-up shirts, dark blue dress pants and ties, and black body armor. They patrolled the walkway, their eyes hidden by their aviator shades, keeping an eye on things.
They didn't look twice at Luci.
Ah, there's Stellar …
But, as she headed towards its creamy beige walls, the gears in her mind started spinning.
Wait a minute. This is the same level as Neon Nihon …
Her eyes darted to the familiar, beckoning sign a few facades away from Stellar. Neon Nihon was the retail brand Electric Heaven, the huge — and hugely-insular — starliner the Japanese people called home these days, used to export their stuff throughout the galaxy.
Due to the crappy state of the starnet …
And how reliably unreliable technology in space was …
People who spent a lot of time among the stars trusted physical media over digital data.
At least when it came to their entertainment.
Luci's eyes glazed over at the thought of all those sweet, precious yuri manga volumes sitting on the store's shelves.
It … shouldn't be a problem if I … pop in for a bit …
Giddy, Luci hurried over to Neon Nihon and ducked inside.