[h3]Sara Araya[/h3][hr][sup][h3][b][i][/i][/b][/h3][/sup][color=Gainsboro][indent][indent][indent][indent][justify]

The sky above her flickered, clear blue skies and white clouds vanishing with the high-pitched whine of a cooling fan stuttering to life. From the kitchen she could hear swearing in Taglish, punctuated by the loud clang of a ladle hitting soft metal. The cashier standing in front of her shrugged, his pimpled face reddened and covered with a fresh layer of grease and sweat, his lips pursed in a bored frown. He didn’t seem surprised, as if it was a common occurrence for the environmental suite to fail. The bare PVC around her was worn down, scuffed by years of small bumps, stained by blots of what she hoped were soy sauce and yellowed strings of grease.

Wok Hey! had not come highly recommended, but the price was right, and the bold, green B plastered in the window offered Sara some comfort. She was eating on her own dime. A small sacrifice for some privacy, for some time to be by herself. Like any good spacer, she took any chance she could to get off the ship. There would come a time when such opportunities were a half-remembered luxury. After more than a week ship bound, the artificial gravity felt strange, a constant pull that tugged at her limbs, compressing her spine, and leaving her carrying the weight of fresh feebleness.

A waitress, twenty-something going on forty arrived inhaling from a bright pink stick of sleek plastic. A thin reed she cradled in one of her hands. The bags under her eyes were heavy, the weary jitters in her fingers unmistakable. Long shifts and little sleep. Adrastea-1 was being run hard. And the workers were no exception. Nodding towards a scattered collection of tables and chairs, the waitress picked up a menu and wordlessly motioned for Sara to follow her. She didn’t say anything as she dropped the menu and a pair of chopsticks she fished out of her stained, half-folded apron onto the table. 

“Water?” Sara said, half question, half request, before the waitress vanished in another puff of sickly smelling smoke. Not many customers had chosen to dine in. But she had time to kill. She wasn’t interested in going back to the ship. Not any time soon. She had hours, HOURS to spend all by herself. It was a pleasant thought. Not that they would be there for very long. Adrastea-1 was just another stopping point. One out of a million other shitty spaceports scattered across the galaxy. Worn down places full of worn down people. Bodies that had been ground down like the raw materials they had spent generations mining. The work took something from them. Drained them in ways that she doubted they even noticed themselves. She sold herself in a different fashion, but  she could imagine it. Powered down ships drifting in the cold of space was nothing special to her. She had felt the cold move across her skin as they waited in silence, everything turned off save a small bank of life support systems required to keep them alive. Shivered as freezing water dripped onto her skin, touching her with motes of fire that sent lightening bolts of pain down her nerves. Her teeth had rattled as it seeped through the blackened pores of her flesh, deep into her bones, until she forgot what it was like to be warm.

Ice, she recalled from Everest’s presentation, they mined ice on Andraste-1. Data blinked into existence. Navigation points forming grotesque shapes in her mind. Endless strings that bound the solar system together in a maddening form that changed direction with each gravitational field that intersected the dashed green lines.


“What’ll it be?” The waitress asked, impatiently interrupting Sara’s idle thoughts, her voice tinged with corporate enforced politeness, her lips twisted into a smile that never reached her eyes. Sara looked down at the yellowed menu, the laminated plastic curled at the edges, making it hard to read the already scraped over lettering. Thick black lines masked nearly half the list, jagged scratches indicating the prices of what little remained. 

“Any meat?” Sara finally asked, abandoning any attempts at deciphering the chicken scratches.

“Nothing [i]real[/i], if that’s what you’re looking for. We’ve got a mushroom and yeast powder blend though. Best meatslop you can get this side of Jupiter. Usually people order it with the char kway teow.”

“Good enough,” Sara said, happy to let the conversation end as she handed the menu back to the waitress.

Alone again, Sara pulled out her datapad, connecting to the local net. News didn’t interest her, she wanted a list of the recently arrived ships. Parsing the monotone report, she pretended not to notice the party draped across a nearby table. Four of them. The rough sort, and making no effort to hide it. Lounging as if they owned the place…and maybe they did. She didn’t know. She didn’t care, if she was being honest. One sat on a backwards turned chair, rolling a guitar pick over his knuckles as he belted out some out of tune song. Another waved in the direction of the kitchen, muttering something to his friends that Sara couldn’t make out. The final two were huddled over a small metal tray, dividing up a white powder that they snorted. Laughing and clapping each other on the back as their faces lit up with new life. They hardly noticed her. They didn’t seem to care about any of the customers. They weren’t bothering any of them. But she caught on quick. She saw the way their eyes followed the waitress, beady and wet with expectation. Every time she swiped her debit chip at a table to collect a tip they would call her over. They didn’t touch her, but Sara saw how the young woman flinched. They’d hit her if they had to. If she made them do it. That much was immediately clear.

It wasn’t any of her business. There were worse ways to make a living. Protection rackets were nothing new. Whatever arrangement they had with the waitress was between the five of them. She wasn’t going to get involved, not when it came to local matters, and not when it involved the local citizenry. There was no money in it, but plenty of trouble. No, she was going to eat her meal in peace and quiet. She was going to have a cup of tea. She was going to spend two more hours wandering around the shops. And then she was going to go back to the ship. She’d leave Andraste-1 behind, just another place she’d never think about again. 

It was better that way.

Static crackled from hidden speakers, a mournful song accompanied by lightly plucked strings played from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Unsettled, Sara adjusted the bolero jacket she had worn beneath her spacesuit. The shoulder-holster tucked beneath her right arm moved seamlessly with her. The Viperfish was light, but she could feel the cold metal of the barrel against her skin. The thin filament lined layers of her bodysuit rippled as she returned the datapad the kneeboard strapped to her thigh. She drew a slow, deliberate breath, studying the fingers of her right hand as she moved them one at a time. Fragmentation was a real bitch. The exercises helped, sometimes. It was better than swallowing a mouthful of pills.  

The floral smell that permeated even in the restaurant began to bother her. It reminded her of the air fed through oxygen masks during atmospheric flights. Pure, low moisture oxygen, mixed to prevent freezing. Cheaper, maybe, than running diluted oxygen, but a bad idea, especially around refueling spaceships. Too much oxygen and a fire was all but inevitable. Brushing a hand over the table, Sara felt the pockmarks beneath her fingers. Shallow craters that formed small seas in the plastic. Flecks of red spray paint clung to her fingertips as she traced the edges of the table, waiting for her food, and willing the nausea to fade.
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