“No, piloting is easy. I’m talking about the momentum exchange system. I’ve got to learn how those things work. There’s so much awesome stuff you can do with them.”
“Well, yeah, they’re pretty much the heart of modern spacefaring tech. Thrusters, deflectors, fusion reactors, mass drivers, artificial gravity and inertial compensators - it’s all based on the momentum exchange effect. I guess things would be pretty primitive without it. But you aren’t seriously telling me it’s the engineering that has you all excited?”
“The ride was a lot of fun,” I admitted. “I bet the passengers are freaking out.”
“Oh, we leave the inertial compensators turned all the way up in the passenger cabins,” she said dismissively. “We don’t give them an outside feed, either, so they’ve got no idea what they just missed.”
I goggled. “How could anyone miss that lift field?”
“Most people don’t have field sensors, silly.”
Waiting around for the passengers to disembark took forever, especially with the foxgirls all hanging around chatting excitedly about their plans for the evening. But the Hoshidans didn’t want to be ‘cooped up’ on the ship any longer than they had to, and they’d all started making arrangements before we docked. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours before they were all safely offloaded, and we could lock down the ship and head out for our night on the town.
I ended up getting a ride to the club with Lina. Naoko was riding with Captain Sokol and the first mate in that fancy car I’d seen before, and most of the foxgirls went with Chief Benson in a big armored transport. But Lina had a hoverbike she liked to ride whenever she got the chance, and it could carry a passenger.
That was a blast. Flying across the field with the wind in my hair, my arms around Lina’s firm waist and the engine throbbing between my thighs. I was in heaven.
Ash wasn’t so thrilled about it, but he was just being a grouch. He had his claws hooked into the structural weave of my overdress, so there was no way the wind was going to knock him off my shoulder.
Zanfeld was a Mars-type planet, so the air was way too thin for talking. I commed Lina instead.
“This is great!”
“Isn’t it?” She agreed. “It’s my own custom job. I built it around a Quantum Dynamics X12 racing core, but the styling is all mine. I fit in an expanded heat sink for vacuum ops, modified the wind screen to double as particle shielding, and switched out the power cells for a nuke pack. I can go for a ride just about anywhere.”
“How fast does it go?” I asked.
“In thin atmo like this we could probably break fifteen hundred kloms an hour, but the steering isn’t fast enough to handle that kind of speed. With a breathable atmosphere she’s subsonic, but not by much.”
Oh, yeah. I was definitely going to build myself a hoverbike someday.
We cleared the landing field quickly, and Lina slowed down as we hit a big dome-shaped force field over the commercial district. It was yet another type of momentum exchange field I hadn’t seen before, but I quickly figured out that it was tuned to mostly affect gas molecules instead of solid objects. Inside it, the commercial district had breathable air.
At first glance the town reminded me of the port back on Felicity. A chaotic jumble of buildings in a dozen different styles, flashing signs and lurid datanet ads, exotic spacers wandering the sidewalks. Only here the spacers weren’t all women, and the locals were pretty exotic themselves.
Apparently cybernetics were a big thing on Zanfeld, because practically all the locals had at least one gleaming metal body part. Arms were popular, but there were a lot of other variations. I saw a guy with half his head covered in metal, and a glowing red optic replacing one eye. There was another guy with a big jet pack built into his back, and a woman whose chest was some kind of flexible memory metal.
“What’s with the weird mechanical look?” I asked Lina.
“It’s a local culture thing. They show off their mods to look tough. Check out the guys on the corner up there.”
I looked, and spotted a guy who’d replaced his whole lower body with some kind of mechanical centaur thing. He was arguing with another local, who had six extra limbs attached to a metal hump on his back. A top-heavy spacer woman with long blonde hair stood between them, looking amused.
“Wow. That’s some crazy stuff.”
“Wait until you see some of our customers. There’s this one colony we trade with where they’re trying to adapt themselves to live on hot gas giants. They haven’t settled on a design yet, so they’ve got all kinds of weird stuff going on with wings and gas bags and tentacles.”
“Gas giants? Seriously?”
“Yep. They’ve got this whole big thing about how gas giants are a bigger ecological niche than terrestrial planets, and no one will be able to invade them there.”
“That’s dumb. A thick atmosphere would transmit shock waves really well, and there’s no surface where you can dig shelters. If I was attacking them I’d just grab some antimatter asteroids from the Beta Layer and drop them into the atmosphere.”
She laughed. “That’s our tiny terror. Just keep those destructive impulses in check at the club, alright? I like this place.”
“Lina! I’m to going to blow up the club, I promise.”
Greymore’s was easily the biggest building I’d ever seen, not that that was saying much. It took up a whole block, with a high wall screening the grounds from the street. A circular driveway at the front led to a fancy entrance area, with steps leading up to a pair of doors big enough to admit a tank. As we pulled in a row of holographic images lit up, advertising the club’s services. Dancing and musical acts, fine dining, parties and catering, secure meeting rooms, a datefinder service…
Lina sent her bike off to park itself, and pulled me towards the entrance. “Come on, you. No sense standing around looking at ads when we could be inside having fun.”
She led me through the doors, and across an entry area into the club proper. A wall of sound hit me as the doors opened.
The main floor of the club must have been fifty meters square, with a bar along one wall and a stage where a group of cyborgs were pumping out something that was probably supposed to be music. There was a big dance floor full of people in the middle of the room, and a scattering of tables and booths along the walls. Overhead I could make out four floors worth of balconies, none of which seemed to connect to each other.
Lina pointed at a balcony. “That’s us. Fourth floor, slot three. We’ve got a nice custom layout behind the balcony, including a private crew lounge and a few bedrooms for anyone who ends up needing one. But the Captain’s got some meetings lined up, so we should stay out from underfoot for a few hours.”
“Okay. Isn’t that expensive, though? I thought the ship only stopped here every three or four months?”