Jackson Ford - Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

They know this already, too. Why is she telling them? Heat creeps up her cheeks, a sensation she does her best to ignore.

“Anyway, if you’ve got any questions about the early days of the Expansion, while we were still constructing the jump gates, then I’m your girl. I actually did my dissertation on—”

Movement, behind her. She turns to see one of the other tour guides, a big dude with a tribal tattoo poking out of the collar of his red company shirt.

“Oh, thank God,” Hannah hisses at him. “Do you know how to fix the sim?”

He ignores her. “OK, folks,” he says to the room, smooth and loud. “That concludes our VR demonstration. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them while our next group of guests are getting set up.”

Before Hannah can say anything, he turns to her, his smile melting away. “Your sim slot was over five minutes ago. Get out of here.”

He bends down, and with an effortless series of commands, resets the simulator. As the tourists file out, the bearded man glances at her, shaking his head.

Hannah digs in her back pocket, her face still hot and prickly. “Sorry. The sim’s really good, and I got kind of wrapped up in it, so…” She says the words with a smile, which fades as the other guide continues to ignore her.

She doesn’t even know what she’s doing—the sim wasn’t good. It was creepy. Learning about a battle was one thing—actually being there, watching people get blown to pieces…

Sighing, she pulls her crumpled tab out of her pocket and unfolds it. Her schedule is faithfully written out on it, copied off her lens—a habit she picked up when she was a kid, after her mom’s lens glitched and they missed a swimming trial. “Can you tell me how to get to the dock?”

The other guide glances at the outdated tab, his mouth forming a moue of distaste. “There should be a map on your lens.”

“Haven’t synced it to the station yet.” She’s a little too embarrassed to tell him that it’s still in its solution above the tiny sink in her quarters, and she forgot to go back for it before her shift started.

She would give a kidney to go back now, and not just for the lens. Her staff cabin might be small enough for her to touch all four walls at once without stretching, but it has a bed in it. With sheets . They might be scratchy and thin and smell of bleach, but the thought of pulling them over her head and drifting off is intoxicating.

The next group is pushing inside the VR room, clustered in twos and threes, eyeing the somewhat threadbare motion seats. The guide has already forgotten Hannah, striding towards the incoming tourists, booming a welcome.

“Thanks for your help,” Hannah mutters, as she slips out of the room.

The dock. She was there yesterday, wasn’t she? Coming off the intake shuttle. How hard could it be to find a second time? She turns right out of the VR room, heading for where she thinks the main station atrium is. According to her tab, she isn’t late, but she picks up her pace all the same.

The wide, gently curved walkway is bordered by a floor-to-ceiling window taller than the house Hannah grew up in. The space is packed with more tourists. Most of them are clustered at the apex, admiring the view dominated by the Horsehead Nebula.

Hannah barely caught a glimpse when they arrived last night, which was filled with safety briefings and room assignments and roster changes and staff canteen conversations that were way too loud. She had sat at a table to one side, both hoping that someone would come and talk to her, and hoping they wouldn’t.

In the end, with something like relief, she’d managed to slink off for a few hours of disturbed sleep.

The station she’s on used to be plain old Sigma XV—a big, boring, industrial mining outpost that the Colony and the Frontier fought over during the war. They still did mining here—helium-3, mostly, for fusion reactors—but it was now also known as the Sigma Hotel and Luxury Resort.

It always amazed Hannah just how quickly it had all happened. It felt like the second the war ended, the tour operators were lobbying the Frontier Senate for franchise rights. Now, Sigma held ten thousand tourists, who streamed in through the big jump gate from a dozen different worlds and moons, excited to finally be able to travel, hoping for a glimpse of the Neb.

Like the war never happened. Like there weren’t a hundred different small conflicts and breakaway factions still dotted across both Frontier and Colonies. The aftershocks of war, making themselves known.

Not that Sigma Station was the only one in on the action. It was happening everywhere—apparently there was even a tour company out Phobos way that took people inside a wrecked Colony frigate which hadn’t been hauled back for salvage yet.

As much as Hannah feels uncomfortable with the idea of setting up a hotel here, so soon after the fighting, she needs this job. It’s the only one her useless history degree would get her, and at least it means that she doesn’t have to sit at the table at her parents’ house on Titan, listening to her sister talk about how fast her company is growing.

The walkway she’s on takes a sharp right, away from the windows, opening up into an airy plaza. The space is enormous, climbing up ten whole levels. A glittering light fixture the size of a truck hangs from the ceiling, and in the centre of the floor there’s a large fountain, fake marble cherubs and dragons spouting water streams that criss-cross in midair.

The plaza is packed with more tourists, milling around the fountain or chatting on benches or meandering in and out of the shops and restaurants that line the edges. Hannah has to slow down, sorry-ing and excuse-me-ing her way through.

The wash of sensations almost overwhelms her, and she can’t help thinking about the sheets again. White. Cool. Light enough to slide under and—

No. Come on. Be professional.

Does she go left from here, or is it on the other side of the fountain? Recalling the station map she looked at while they were jumping is like trying to decipher something in Sanskrit. Then she sees a sign above one of the paths leading off the plaza. Ship Dock B . That’s the one.

Three minutes later, she’s there. The dock is small, a spartan mustering area with four gangways leading out from the station to the airlock berths. There aren’t many people around, although there are still a few sitting on benches. One of them, a little girl, is asleep: curled up with her hands tucked between shoulder and cheek, legs pulled up to her chest. Her mom—or the person Hannah thinks is her mom—sits next to her, blinking at something on her lens.

There are four tour ships visible through the glass, brightly lit against the inky black. Hannah’s been on plenty of tours, and she still can’t help thinking that every ship she’s ever been on is ugly as hell. She’s seen these ones before: they look like flattened, upside-down elephant droppings, a bulbous protrusion sticking out over each of the cockpits.

Hannah jams her hand in her jeans pocket for the tab. She wrote the ship’s name for the shift in tiny capitals next to the start time: RED PANDA. Her gaze flicks between the four ships, but it takes her a second to find the right one. The name is printed on the side in big, stencilled letters, with a numbered designation in smaller script underneath.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air

“Furious, frenetic, fun, and ‘f**k you’: All equally valid descriptions of this book and its punk rock chef/psychic warrior protagonist. It’s like the X-Men, if everybody was sick of each other’s sh*t, they had to work manual labor to pay rent, and Professor X was a sociopathic government stooge. A drunken back-alley brawler of a book.”