It took me a second look to realize that there was furniture in the room. A couch and a couple of comfy-looking recliners that all looked like some kind of living plant furniture, clustered around a big display projector. An opening in the back led into a little hallway through which I could see a kitchen, a washroom door, and… stairs? Wait, there was a balcony along the back of the room.
I ran up the stairs, and found a study overlooking the living room. Beyond that was a huge bedroom with walls of living wood that reminded me of my dorm room at the orphanage. But here there was an opening like a cave mouth on the far side, with a few steps leading down into a bathing area like an underground grotto. There was a tub big enough to swim in, and the fanciest shower I’d ever seen.
“Do you like it?” Naoko said from behind me.
“This is all for me?” I said. I could hardly believe it. “I get to live here?”
“Yes, Alice. This is all for you.”
The next thing I knew I was hugging her.
“Thank you, Naoko. I love it! I can’t believe you had something like this in a catalog.”
“I may have made a few adjustments,” she admitted. “Changing cabin layouts is part of my job as stewardess, so I’ve developed some skill with the system.”
“You’re amazing! This is perfect, Naoko. It’s like my own little lair in the forest, only not so little. I can’t wait to try that bath. Only, what happened to the Square Deal being a bare-bones freighter with tiny little crew cabins?”
“I also said that Felicity is quite poor, did I not? Most people would consider this rather cramped, Alice. The ceiling is too low for proper trees, there are no servant quarters or athletic facilities, and the public spaces have barely any separation at all from your private study and bedroom.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe how rich you spacers are. I wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of room anyway. Um, can I put fish in the pond?”
“Certainly. Permanent crew are allowed to keep pets, so long as they can’t escape your cabin. Do a good job, and we can buy you some to celebrate once you’ve signed a contract.”
“I will, Naoko. You’ll see. I’m going to be a super amazing cabin girl, and the captain is going to wonder how you ever got along without me, and he’ll hire me for real and then I’ll stay here forever.”
She smiled. “Forever is a long time, Alice. But I shall be glad of your company, for as long as we both remain here.”
Chapter 6
I was puzzling my way through a primer on starship electrical systems when the sudden jolt of a hyperspace transition pulled me away from my studies.
It turned out that the courses Naoko had pointed me to were only six hours long, and the VR instruction could be run at triple speed. So I’d easily blown through all three of them once she left me to study, and moved on to other topics. I’ve always wanted to know more about how things work, an interest that wasn’t considered respectable back on Felicity. So I’d spent most of the night poking through the engineering classes in the ship’s library, reading anything that looked interesting while I ordered one snack after another from the ship’s autochef.
Well, that and unpacking my new toys. The robots Chief West had assigned me really did look like miniature dragons. They were about the size of a housecat, with eyes like jewels and a beautiful red and black color scheme. They were so realistic I had to look close to see that they were bots, and they acted like little predators. I’d named them Smoke and Ash, and I already loved them.
Too bad their design wasn’t open source. I’d looked them up in the ship’s database, and apparently they’d cost almost a hundred credits. Ouch.
I paused the education program, and checked the ship’s status. We were in the Gamma Layer now, and making our approach to Takeo Station? I must have been so caught up in my class that I missed the jump warning.
The approach might be interesting to watch, and if not I could always go back to studying. So I paused the program, wiggled out of the little VR pod that Naoko had installed behind a hidden panel in my study, and headed for the bathroom. A quick shower, a fresh dress, and I could be down in the crew lounge in plenty of time.
On second thought, why not wear my spacesuit? Maybe it would help make the rest of the crew take me seriously. I had better odds with that than another dress, even if the ship’s library did have a lot of cute designs.
I found half a dozen people in the lounge, most of them clustered around a big holographic display that showed the ship’s surroundings. There was a pretty big station a few million kloms out, and all kinds of smaller clutter around us.
“Alice!” Mina waved me over with a smile. “Come to check out the view?” She gestured at the display with her cup, almost spilling it in the process.
“That’s right. I’ve never seen another system before. What am I looking at here?”
“You mean the stations? Pretty typical system defenses. The big station mounts heavy graser cannons, with enough range to pick off anyone trying to get in or out of the system. That globe of sensor platforms a light-minute out is to make sure no one can sneak in close without being spotted.”
I studied the display for a moment. “I think I get it. The Gamma Layer has better visibility than the Delta Layer, right?”
In school they’d taught us that there are four hyperspace universes, the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta layers. Each layer is smaller than the previous one by a factor of pi cubed, so shifting to a higher layer lets you get places a lot faster than you could in normal space. But each layer is a whole universe, and while quantum physics is the same everywhere cosmology isn’t. So each layer had its own unique problems for travelers to overcome.
“Exactly,” Mina confirmed. “The Delta Layer has this weird repulsive gravity force that keeps stars from forming, and the part corresponding to Known Space is just a huge cloud of diffuse plasma. It interferes quite a bit with long-range sensors, and the big slow-haul cargo ships can’t get up there anyway because the Delta transition requires such a steep power curve. So everyone puts their border security here in the Gamma Layer, where you can see clear to the edge of the universe with a good telescope.”
I could picture the geometry, now that I thought about it. Hyperspace transitions are pretty obvious, so any ship trying to sneak into the system undetected would have to pass through the Gamma Layer a long way out from the station. But a million kilometers in the Gamma Layer would become thirty million in the Beta Layer, or nine hundred million down in the Alpha Layer. At a normal cruising speed of maybe a hundred kilometers per second it would take months for a ship to work its way around the fringes of the system without being spotted, and even then they’d be seen the moment they lit their drive. The same problem in reverse meant that a ship fleeing the system would have to pass close to the main station to escape into the Delta Layer.