I studied the fence again. At first glance it looked like a series of tall brown poles with sheets of dark green fabric hung between them. But my spectrometer said the ‘fabric’ was some kind of woven carbon fiber, and I was picking up a lot of electrical activity. Sensors, probably, so if I tried to climb over it I’d be spotted for sure. The fence was a little overgrown in places, but the other side was just a cleared area twenty meters wide with another fence beyond it. Getting past that without being seen would be tough.
This was probably the wrong place to try it, anyway. Looking over the fence from my treetop perch, I could see a wide black expanse of landing field with bright orange markings here and there. It was way too open for sneaking unless I used my stealth suite, and I couldn’t afford to burn off that kind of energy right now.
Here and there I could see spaceships. Or maybe just shuttles. Most of the gleaming machines on the field seemed too small to be real spaceships, and one of them even had wings. But there were a couple of blocky shapes that had to be a hundred meters long. Each of those was surrounded by swarms of bots, busily unloading cargo containers.
There were buildings in the distance, on the other side of the landing field. Maybe there would be less security there?
I shimmied down the tree, and started working my way around the spaceport. There was a swamp bordering the fence to the south, so I circled around to the north instead. The ground was firmer there, and I made good time jogging through the trees. There didn’t seem to be any security bots, so at least that was one less thing to worry about.
It was kind of weird, seeing artificial buildings for the first time. I was used to the great housetrees that made up the orphanage, and the handful of places the matrons had taken us to on field trips over the years. Housetrees can grow to full size in just three or four years, and you can buy custom versions designed to grow into any shape you might want. They provide light and clean water for their inhabitants, and even a little bit of power for a local network. Why would anyone go to all the trouble of building something artificial, when you could just plant a seed and wait?
Apparently offworlders didn’t think that way, because I found a whole clump of odd-looking buildings on the other side of the spaceport. They came in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, from rows of giant boxes to little round huts. A tall tower sculpted into the shape of a double helix rose from an area filled with flashing lights and radio noise, which seemed to be the heart of the… town?
My database supplied the unfamiliar word. I looked over the messy spread of buildings again, and nodded. Yeah, a town.
Getting in proved easier than I expected. There was only a single line of fence around the town, probably to keep animals from wandering in out of the jungle. A lot of the perimeter was just buildings with bits of fence blocking the spaces between them, and there were places where the jungle grew right up to them. Most of the buildings didn’t seem to have security, either. All I had to do to get in was climb a tree, and crawl out to where I could drop onto a convenient roof.
Sweet. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face as I crawled to the edge of the roof, and peered carefully down at the street below.
People. So many people, and all of them looked so interesting. I’d learned in class that Felicity has a population of over thirty million, but settlements of more than a hundred people were rare. The dryads like their nature, and staying spread out was supposed to minimize their ecological impact.
Clearly, no one here cared about that. There must have been thousands of people in the town, and hardly any of them were dryads. I saw lots of big, rough-looking women wearing everything from armored jumpsuits to leather miniskirts. A good number of dog and cat morphs were sprinkled through the crowd, along with more bots and androids than I’d ever seen before.
“This looks like my kind of place,” I said to myself. “Now, how do I get some clothes?”
There was an amazing amount of radio noise in the air, and something in the back of my head recognized parts of it. Com signals, radar implants, private datalinks… aha! There was a public datanet.
I fumbled my way through the login handshake, and created an account. It wanted an ID code? Well, I wasn’t about to use my real one, but… oh, good. There was a program in my head for generating fake codes. I threw together a forged identity packet, and used it to log in to the network.
Thanks, Mom. But why did you think your little girl would need to be able to forge identity codes? For that matter, how did you do it? Stealing an identity provider’s private key can’t have been easy.
I’d barely finished the login when a few hundred data packets hit me all at once. Messages from shops wanting to sell me things, a whole bunch of ‘surveys’ asking personal questions I wasn’t going to answer, and… oh, goddess.
I blushed furiously. Why was Tatiana’s Massage Parlor sending me naughty pictures of their masseuses? Didn’t their computer see the age header on my identity packet?
Was this advertising? No wonder it was so restricted on Felicity.
I told myself to ignore any more messages like those, and went looking for public services. That’s what networks like this were supposed to be for, right? Aha, there was the information site. Maps of the town, port rules, locations of public facilities. That was the stuff I needed.
It took the better part of an hour to work my way carefully across the town to a public restroom that didn’t seem to be very busy. I watched it for long enough to be pretty sure it was empty, and then cloaked myself just long enough to drop off the roof and dart inside.
Being surrounded by walls of some synthetic material instead of wood was kind of weird, but aside from that the layout was about what I expected. Sinks and mirrors in the front, and then a hallway lined with doors. I hurried nervously down the hall to the full-service cubicles at the end, and claimed the first one I came to.
It had all the essentials, just like I’d hoped. A toilet, in its own little room. A sink and mirror, with some kind of cosmetics station. A shower, and oh goddess was I looking forward to getting clean again. Then the service closet, with a laundry machine and clothes fabber right next to the first aid station. Perfect.
After drowning myself in hot water and body wash for half an hour I felt a lot more human. I picked out a simple red dress from the fabber’s menu, with underwear and matching shoes. Maybe a ribbon for my hair? No, that made me look three years younger. No one was going to hire a girl they thought was ten.
Would they hire a girl who looked thirteen? I had basically no skills a spaceship crew would be interested in. Most captains would just laugh in my face, wouldn’t they?
“Then I’ll keep trying until I find someone who doesn’t,” I told my reflection. “I can live here for a long time if I have to. I can sneak out to catch meals, or go into conservation mode and just not eat for a couple of weeks. A lot of ships must come through here, so it’s only a matter of time until I find someone who’ll give me a chance.”