Some of her efforts made me look like a confection, and others were just too weird. Or sexy. Apparently being nearly naked was fashionable on a lot of colonies, but I really wasn’t ready to show that much skin. What we finally settled on was more conservative, but I liked the effect.
It was a layered outfit, starting with an airy white dress with ruffled sleeves and a skirt that didn’t quite reach my knees. Over that was a dark blue outer layer that covered my torso but left my arms bare, with a split skirt that reached my calves on the sides but basically didn’t have a front or back. The edges of that were picked out in a complicated pattern of gold embroidery, which matched the gold necklace and earrings that came with it. The shoes were simple open-toed flats, and a pair of fingerless blue gloves completed the outfit. The gun we picked out was a slim blue and white mass driver, in a holster that attached to the dress at the small of my back. After a moment’s consideration Kara added four gold bracelets on each wrist.
“I like it,” I admitted, looking at my reflection in the full-length mirror. “It’s not armor, and the gun is kind of dinky, but it’s pretty.”
“Oh, I think we can satisfy you on the practical side of things too,” Mina said knowingly. “The quick-fab version is just for trying things on, you know. Kara, what are the specs on the smart matter version?”
“The underdress is only a millimeter of light duty armor,” Kara admitted. “But the overdress is another three millimeters, and the ensemble can morph into a full coverage bodysuit in thirty seconds. There’s a deflector grid woven into the overdress along with proximity radar, good enough to stop shrapnel and low-velocity debris. The gun is a custom case wrapped around a Nova Arms 6mm mass driver core, with a peak muzzle velocity of eight hundred meters per second. I recommend standard guided dual-purpose rounds for tonight, but you can load it with anything from nanobots to Californium rounds.”
“Californium rounds? Why would you make a bullet out of some rare artificial isotope?”
“Technically they don’t,” Mina informed me. “It’s just one of those literary terms that got used as a product name, and then turned into a standard nickname. The idea is you make a hollow bullet out of a highly radioactive isotope with a very low critical mass, and fill the space in the middle with a compressible neutron moderator. When you fire it the bullet hits the target’s armor and collapses, squirting all the filling out openings in the sides as it crunches up, until you get a solid lump that’s just over critical mass. Then it goes boom.”
A nuclear pistol round? “Seriously? That sounds awesome! What’s the yield?”
“You can get up to thirty tons or so with the right isotopes,” Kara said. “But they’re really expensive. The isotopes have to be synthesized with a particle accelerator, and they decay so fast you have to re-fab the bullets every few days.”
“They’re also radioactive enough to be a health hazard for normal humans, and a lot of places ban them,” Mina said. “It’s a cool idea, but it usually isn’t worth it. I definitely don’t recommend it for tonight. If you need AoE just use your grenades.”
“Grenades?” I looked myself over with a frown. “Where?”
“The bracelets,” Kara said. “The real ones are self-propelled grenades, with a decent guidance package and a hundred grams of hyperexplosive filler. Just don’t go firing them off on the dance floor, even if we do have trouble. If you injure a bystander the wergild comes out of your pay.”
“I know, I know. Naoko made me do a whole class on the Association code after Hoshida. If the inugami come for Naoko again I’ll be careful.”
Mina snickered. “At least you’re learning. But hey, don’t get all paranoid and forget to enjoy yourself. Zanfeld is a Rom colony, and those guys really hate yakuza. No one is going to try anything here. The worst you have to worry about is getting caught up in a bar fight, and you’d probably enjoy that.”
“That’s right,” Kara said. “So relax, and have fun. Hey, maybe you can even catch yourself a cute guy or two.”
“I think our tiny terror is more into girls,” Mina mused.
I rolled my eyes. “You guys are terrible.”
Thankfully, their teasing was interrupted by the shudder of the Square Deal dropping out of the Delta Layer. That always seemed to be a rough transition, and both foxgirls had to stop and lean against the nearest bulkhead for a moment while their sensors recalibrated.
“Ugh,” I complained. “That’s so annoying. Are you two alright?”
Mina shrugged. “Yeah, it’s just worse for us because we’re hooked into the ship’s stress monitors. People don’t think about it, but even with diamondoid structural materials a Delta transition is pretty close to the limits of what a ship can take. The dimensional shear forces are pretty intense, especially on older ships like the Square Deal. It feels like we’re going to have to rebuild the bulkhead between holds eleven and twelve again, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, the self-repair system isn’t keeping up,” Kara agreed. “I keep saying we need to move The Beast closer to the ship’s centerline, but the first mate never wants to hear it.”
“The Beast?” I asked.
The foxgirls gave me matching grins.
“It’s a secret,” Mina said.
“Maybe we’ll show you sometime, if you’re good,” Kara told me. “But right now we’ve got a night on the town to get ready for. Let’s get your things fabbed up before the passengers start to think about disembarking, and Naoko gets swamped again.”
The next few hours were pretty busy, but I managed to keep an eye on the exterior feed as we made our way into the system. According to the atlas I’d looked at Zanfeld was just outside Federation space, and I was curious what it would look like.
I quickly discovered that it was completely different than either Felicity or Hoshida. Zanfeld was a Mars-type planet orbiting a dim red dwarf star, and the colony seemed to be on the surface. But with a mere hundred thousand people in the system it barely even looked like a colony. There weren’t any stations, and the port was basically just a commercial district for visiting spacers.
Where did the people live?
There was a lot of air traffic on Zanfeld, and eventually I realized that there were underground complexes dug out all over the region around the port. There were also a lot more ships than I would have expected from such a small colony. A couple of refinery ships operating fleets of ramscoop shuttles, harvesting the atmosphere of the system’s gas giant to make fuel and light feedstocks. Mining operations on several of the gas giant’s moons, and small cargo ships carrying their production to factory ships in Zanfeld orbit. More ships that I mistook for passenger liners at first, until I realized they were in long-term parking orbits. An orbital shipyard that looked suspiciously like it was designed to be broken down and loaded into cargo ships. A whole squadron of system patrol boats, of a design that looked seriously out of date even to my amateur eyes.