Nuka-Girl

I looked at the pug dog who sat there panting and staring around at everything. She was theoretically my new pet, but the thing had been acting odd since it arrived weeks ago. Shortly before my Taylor body left Los Angeles, this thing had walked into my door with Mrs Pegpig riding on its back like it was a horse. The bird would use one wing to point a direction, and the dog walked that way dutifully. They had been trying to make it up the stairs before my security had stopped them, but they were already well aware of my pet pigeon, so they didn't know what to do and called me.

Seeing my pigeon ride around on a small, tan pug was pretty weird. Just seeing a pug was pretty weird. Los Angeles didn't have the best atmospheric conditions, possibly even worse than Night City, and pugs had trouble breathing even in the best of times. There were no roving grumbles of pugs in LA, as far as I could tell. But this dog didn't have any embedded implant suggesting it was someone's pet, either. Checking my surveillance feed had the dog coming up from the south with Mrs Pegpig flying along with her.

I had tried to find its owner but had no luck. It was a mystery. Was Mrs Pegpig trying to find the Hasumi body a replacement pet? The bird departed with my Taylor body back to Night City, after all. I knew I frequently thought about how Mrs Pegpig was more intelligent than the average bird, but that was going beyond just being smart for a bird.

The dog seemed less intelligent than Mrs Pegpig, at least, but a lot of that was just my opinion on its stupid pug face. It didn't need a leash to go on walks, so it was probably smarter than the average dog. David was the one that was mostly taking care of her, but she liked sitting on my lap or coming in with me into my lab, although I often didn't let her in if I was going to be working for a long period, just in case she pooped inside. It cost five hundred eurodollars a month for the fee for a pet permit in Los Angeles, and that was less than the charge for Night City.

I frowned at it. A few simple modifications would help it breathe better, at least. Maybe some respirocyte-building cybernetics, too, so it could rely on stored oxygen and didn't have to breathe the crappy Los Angeles air when it went outside to pee. I frowned. That would be a good modification for most people, too. Were there any commercially available respirocytes, I wondered, or would I have to invent one?

"C'mere," I said to the pug, who suddenly looked at me warily, still panting while my hands were outstretched and grasping for the animal.

---xxxxxx---

The flight on the spaceplane was intense. Apparently, anti-gravity technology only worked when it was very close to a gravity well in the first place. So you could use it on the planetary surface but not in space. Not for propulsion and not for simulating gravity, either. That was a bit of a let-down, as that was real science fiction stuff. So instead, I gripped the handrest of my economy-class seat tightly as the variable-geometry motors of the spaceplane shifted from scramjet mode to pure rocket. The acceleration forces pushed me into my padded seat while on the wall in front of us was an accelerometer that displayed our current "g-forces" and had pegged out at three gs briefly before slowly falling.

The Crystal Palace was very interesting, but I wouldn't have permission to explore it freely. In addition to the huge recreational and business areas that it was famous for, it acted as a vast transhipment hub, and this part of the station was where I was limited to. There would be no gilded oak panelled walls in this area, and no scantily clad hostesses, merely bare metal and shift workers, but everything was still very interesting. My first experience in microgravity was amazing, and I spent the entire spaceplane flight up looking out of the window at the Earth below. I noticed a few frequent fliers snort at me, at me acting like a tourist, but I didn't care at all.

The colour of the Earth below was different from what I was expecting, different from the NASA images I had seen in Brockton Bay. The blue was mostly the same, but there were a lot fewer green areas than I expected. Most places appeared browner than I recalled, with even the areas that were obviously cultivated appearing darker yellow.

Microgravity was a hoot, and there was time enough on the flight up to the Crystal Palace to experience it thoroughly. I was very fortunate I was not one of the approximately one-third of people who got violently ill in space, too. I had been watched most of the flight by the stewardesses, as were all of the few "new flyers", just in case this happened. One person did throw up, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be from what I knew about "space adaptation syndrome." Watching him heave into a small bag and then a stewardess rush to use a small vacuum to suck up the free-floating remnants was gross, but it also gave me ideas for a pharmaceutical that could prevent the reaction from taking place. Something for Dr Hasumi or maybe even Taylor Hebert to look into later.

As I got off the spaceplane, I saw a clear demarcation. If you went to the right, you would enter the resort and residential area of the Crystal Palace; it was fancy. To the left, you enter the industrial and service areas. There was security at the fork in the path that was there specifically so that people like me did not try to go to the right side in the fork in the road, too. And probably also to ensure that the high-rollers did not go to the plebian areas by mistake.

The industrial areas of the Crystal Palace were spun at half-gravity or were in zero-g, depending on their purpose. There was a surprising amount of freight traffic at the station, as I could see from legitimate spaceships anchored off on booms attached to the station. I spent a few minutes just looking out the windows, zooming in on each surprisingly large vehicle, and wondering which one I was going to be riding in shortly.

The reason for so much traffic was that there were a number of products that were constructed in space that there was just no replacement for on Earth, as a number of industrial processes in a variety of industries ranging from electronics, nanite production, and pharmaceuticals required both vacuum and microgravity.

This meant that some things were ridiculously cheap at the station, whereas other things were ridiculously expensive. I could get the systems-on-a-chip that I used for my first-generation sleep inducers at a tenth of the price up here, and that was because they were made in orbit, in large industrial space stations, and then shipped down the gravity well. At the same time, a thin scop hamburger with no cheese, no fries and no drink costs forty Eurodollars, which was more than eight times as expensive as LA. And that was at the "working people" restaurant in the industrial area of the Crystal Palace. It was true that modern spaceplanes reduced the cost of shipping things to orbit massively, but you couldn't overcome the tyranny of gravity so easily.

It wasn't that it was impossible to build complex transistors and processors down on Earth, but without microgravity, it required the traditional photolithographic process, which used tons and tons of incredibly pure water in the cleaning stages. "Pure water" for industrial processes was priced by the grade, and the "ultrapure water" necessary in chip fabs costs more than fifty eurodollars per litre these days. It was much cheaper to use the different production processes in space than build these large traditional chip fabs on the ground, even if you had to build a huge space station.

Ironically, purifying water in space through vacuum distillation was much cheaper, but nobody would ship water up to orbit and then ship it back down again. While there was some deep space mining activity of small comets or snowballs in popular parlance, the production was nowhere near high enough to ship any water back down the gravity well. As with most things, it was worth so much because it was already in space. A kilo of Chinese steel for sintering stock was worth three Eurodollars, but the same kilo of steel in low-earth orbit was worth forty.

All of this combined to make space a rather weird economy. It was the opposite of what was expected when you thought of "Colonies." The opposite of the "normal" colony model. Colonies were established in space, but instead of raw materials being sent back to Earth like the colonies in the past, it was mostly finished products that went down the gravity well and raw materials and food that got shipped up to orbit. The O'Neill Colony that I was headed to was theoretically self-sufficient with a population of over forty thousand but, in reality, relied on a lot of trade with Earth and other stations.

I finished my burger, fries and lemonade. I was avoiding any carbonated beverages as the flight to the Lagrange point was both long and with minimal amounts of gravity. The freighters used high-efficiency continuous thrust engines—many low-thrust plasma engines powered by fission reactors. The result was that they took quite a while to get going, and the entire flight was probably going to be in microgravity.

Not only were the bubbles of carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages not buoyant in microgravity, but the same applied after you drank them, so burping was impossible. It was best to avoid such beverages unless you were on a station with simulated gravity. If I was staying here in the Crystal Palance, or when I got to the colony, it would be fine... but not for the flight over!

I frowned. There was a digital map app on the Crystal Palace site, but it was rather confusing. I decided to ask the man who ran this burger joint in space, as he seemed pretty pleasant when I ordered my meal. "Can you help me out? I'm trying to find the freight terminals," I told him.

He nodded while flipping patties in unusual ways in the half-gravity, "Leave here, and turn anti-spinward and you're going to need to walk about a third of the ring; I think it is about twenty cors down. Turn spinward and exit into the zero-g area; there will be red lines bordering the door to tell you its in zero-g. Grab the handrail and throw yourself through the door. Then follow the brown line on the deck."

I blinked several times at that unusual vocabulary, but I was not stupid. I was smarter than ever, and I lived a life about four times as fast as the average person, too. I parsed that carefully, following along on the confusing three-dimensional map. "Anti-spinward... that would be to the left, aye?"

He looked up at me and grinned, "Yeah, that's right. Nice. Maybe you'll fit in after all. Ibrahim Olayiwola." He reached out with an offer to shake my hand but then corrected me when I tried to grasp it, saying, "No, no... spacers don't shake that way. Too easy to impart too much momentum in zero-g. It can be a disaster in a p-suit. Just slap or, better yet, lightly tap the palm of my hand with your fingers, like this..." He demonstrated by tapping his fingers on my palm several times.

I reciprocated the gesture and nodded at him, "Hana Rahim. 'Preciate it." I said, trying to mimic Hana's normal, slightly clipped way of speaking. I had hours of her talking, telling me her life story, so it wasn't too difficult to emulate.

The difference in a handshake made absolute sense when I considered it. You could just grab someone and shake them around bodily in microgravity or go flying off as you each imparted forces to each other if you weren't firmly on the deck yourself. But it hadn't been something I had thought of.

He nodded and had a thoughtful expression on his face, "How much time do you have before your ship leaves?"

"Quite a while, about a hundred and fifty mikes," I said, curious as to why he was asking. Perhaps he had some sights I could see; I didn't mind acting the obvious tourist. Although we were in the industrial area, I saw that there was one casino, but I was definitely going to skip that. Gambling was a tax on people who didn't understand probabilities.

He nodded, "Good. You must be headed out to the O'Neil Colony, the only freighter that's scheduled for a departure in the next three hours. Usually, there would be a couple of dozen or more ships coming in and out every shift, but you caught a lull, so it's easy to guess where you headed." He nodded, "On your way to the freight docks, stop in the ship's chandlery, it'll be before the zero-g section, and ditch those boondockers." He then stepped around the counter and held a foot up, showing me some unusual footwear. They looked like heavy-duty socks to me or something akin to light-duty toe shoes, with each individual toe able to move around. This was way different from the steel-toed combat boots I had picked for Hana's "outfit." He continued, "After that, maybe consider a haircut."

I frowned, holding my hand up to my hair. It was barely to my shoulders. I tried to think of what Hana would say, coming up with, "It's within regs."

That got him to laugh, slapping his thigh and saying a few words in a language I couldn't decipher. My OS called it Yoruba, whatever that was, but it didn't have the translation pack downloaded. Then he grinned and continued back in English, "Ya, no doubt, sister. But spacers favour a much shorter cut these days. Maybe no longer than abouuut here..." he made a pixie-style or even boy-cut with his hands around his head, "Gets in the way if you have to wear a p-suit, yanno? Will help you fit in, make you not an obvious immigrant from the dirtball, iffen you want. If you are stuck on longer hair, then get some techhair that lets you change length."

He paused there for a moment and then continued, explaining, "But, to avoid misunderstandings, it is a faux pas to keep it a natural hair colour. Colourise it in very non-natural colours, and it'll show you're not a gonk." Ah. That explained the stewardess who had neon pink hair down to her ass. Maybe.

I took the word dirtball as an obvious pejorative about Earth, which I found interesting. It would make sense that people who lived and worked up here might tend to develop a unique culture and a distaste for the culture and people on Earth, so I thought he was giving me some good advice. I nodded, "If I can find a barber, I'll take your advice."

He snorted and nodded, "Download the unofficial map app, girly. The standard one sucks balls. It's basically designed to get groundsiders lost intentionally. If you was in the main one-gee levels, you'd always tend to get lost and find yourself in the most expensive places, too, ya? Funny how that works out, ya? The one you want should be on the regular app store under the name CrysKharita. Just change the default language to English or whatever, and you're good to go."

I nodded slowly. I'd run that in a virtual machine, just in case—just like I did the official map app. "You're doing me a solid. I guess the least I can do is buy another burger to go. Or maybe two. With cheese this time." Plus, they were kind of small, and this body had a lot bigger appetite than I had been expecting.

He chortled and got back behind the grill.

---xxxxxx---

Ibrahim Olayiwola was a second-generation spacer, or Highrider, as people from the dirtball would call him. An entrepreneur, too. His parents were, too, telling him the story about how they had run their own business in Lagos until they spent everything on a chance to immigrate away from the dirtball. Personally, he'd never been on the planet himself and had no desire to ever do so.

People would be amazed at how much money a slightly reasonably priced greasy burger place could make if it was situated right between the spaceplane docks and the freighter anchorages.

Today was a slow day, as usually, he would have had to call in an hourly worker to take over the grill so he could make an excuse to talk to the new faces. He hadn't even needed to approach this new woman; she started asking him for directions.

This, too, was a source of income. As the only reasonably priced provider of food in between where everyone who was immigrating would have to walk, he was a valued intelligence asset of not only the O'Neill Republics but also the two other O'Neil Colonies that were still corporate-controlled. He didn't discriminate on who he sold intelligence to, after all.

Everything was a datum. Say someone was, on the surface, a working-class person that might have struggled to pay for their lift ticket and immigration escrow to one of the colonies. But then they skipped the cheap filling meal he sold and went to one of the few expensive tourist trap places on the industrial side. Like, maybe the one casino they had? Well, that told people something too. Maybe they weren't as poor as they were letting on, yeah?

He'd already sent his first impressions of this new lady to a half-dozen addresses. It wasn't a letter, just a list of mostly single words, things he'd noticed: "Clean, neat, former military, switched-on, dangerous, groundsider, smart, polite, has the look of a hard worker, willing to assimilate." He didn't need to send more than that, as he was just sending his impressions. All of the colonies were careful to avoid letting dirtball intelligence operatives immigrate if they could help it. Even the Corporate controlled ones didn't want them. They might be owned by Corporations headquartered below, but they were run and manned by people just like him, and everyone was careful to screen immigrants carefully. Not just for spies, either, but temperament.

It was expensive to have children in space. Children had to grow up in full gravity for a significant amount of their childhood, at least until they were ten or twelve. Most people lived in half-g, at most. You could rent slots in public creches, where children could sleep at night in full gee, but it was pricey. Two people had to really want to have children to do it up here, as his parents had. The O'Neill colonies were one of the few places where most of the area was in full gee, but even that wasn't completely accurate as there were over a hundred traditional space stations in and around each of the pairs of longer, hollowed-out cylinders. It was much cheaper to live in these orbiting stations, so most people lived there rather than in the cylinders themselves, which had business, tourism, industry and agriculture in the full-gee areas, as well as, of course, the higher-end residential areas.

That meant that most population growth, even if they just wanted to maintain population levels, was still through immigration, and they didn't want any slackers, stinks or commissars up here. Integrating clued-in groundsiders into a workgroup was so much easier if they weren't gonks, to begin with. Former military people were pretty standard. They were usually pretty technically minded, respected rules and hierarchy, and as such, had a higher percentage of success from a spacer's perspective than the average dirtball civvie. Space was a dangerous place, and people who had often been shot at were usually pretty careful listeners when you started to tell them things like, "If you do this, you will die."

Even then, only fifty per cent of even this demographic worked out. The rest they shipped back to the dirtball. That was one reason why the fees for immigrating were so expensive, as they included your return ticket up-front in case you got kicked out. That, or they died doing something stupid. And that was expensive too! If someone forgot to double-check their O2 bottle charge, asphyxiated on an EVA, and floated off into space, you had to charter a tug to pick them up. Otherwise, their corpse could become a hazard to navigation. Not to mention the p-suit could still be reused.

He'd do what he was doing for free just to help filter the wheat from the chaff, but no way would he admit that! He received one to two hundred Eurdollars or the equivalent in New Yen from everyone he sold his impressions to!

He had a mortgage on his genetic treatments and life extension to pay off, after all.

---xxxxxx---

I was one of the only passengers on the spaceship, as most of the area was devoted to cargo. I had one of the crewmembers explain the operation of my berth, which was more like a chair that could fold out into a bed. It had a curtain you could run around for "privacy." The man said cheerfully, finishing his presentation, "And below your seat is an emergency suit that you can don in case of a pressure emergency."

I glanced at the obvious pressure suit the man was wearing himself, just with no helmet on just now, and then glanced at the bulkhead walls and tapped them, careful not to push myself too much in zero-g. I had already needed this man's help to right myself once, and it had been embarrassing. The hull was aluminium, no doubt mined on the moon rather than shipped up from Earth, hopefully, with some sort of armoured layer between me and the vacuum of space.

I asked curiously, "How fast would it take this spacecraft to depressurise if we got holed by a micrometeorite?"

"Oh, in seconds," he said, smiling even wider.

I nodded, as that was what I expected. The volume of the ship just wasn't that large. I coughed delicately, "I'd like to try to put the suit on, just in case, so I can shorten any time I am floating around dying."

He grinned, reaching underneath the seat to pull it out. It was folded like origami and flattened, like a blanket, inside a heavy-duty clear plastic bag. "That's permissible. But these suits have to be recertified every time they are opened. They inspect the suit for small rips, weigh the O2 canister, you know. Costs about thirty-one-thousand New Yen to recertify one. Still want to do it?" That was about the equivalent of four hundred and ten Eurodollars.

I nodded rapidly. It would be worth it at twice that price. He handed it to me and even walked me through the process, giving me tips on how I could shave a few seconds off here and there. I was tempted to wear the thing the entire flight over there, but it was clearly a thin suit designed only for emergencies. Not like the fancy pressure suit the crewmember had on. One of those sounded like one of the first things I might buy.

The trip was very uneventful, thankfully. I found myself surprised—utterly shocked, actually, at how much thrust the ship was putting out when we got going. I never actually looked at the numbers, but there had to be close to one-twentieth of a gravity of acceleration forces involved. That didn't sound like a lot, but it would make a plum bob fall true, and furthermore, it was actually incredibly fast acceleration for a spaceship carrying a lot of cargo.

I had been wondering just how it was possible at all for there to be any activity in deep space whatsoever. But assuming they could maintain this acceleration indefinitely, then you could travel from Earth to Mars in ten to fifteen days, not six months like I was expecting with chemical rockets.

I didn't know if that was actually possible because our flight plan, according to the entertainment system, was over thirty hours and did not accelerate continuously. Large segments would be in zero-g before we decelerated into orbit at the metastable point the colony of dozens of space stations lived in.

I had no idea how these spaceships worked, though, but it may be just a matter of them wanting to save fuel... or rather, reaction mass since it was fission-powered. I was curious how they dissipated the heat of a fission reactor without cooking us all inside the ship, and I wondered about how they shielded the cabin from the radiation the reactor put out during operation.

Thinking about that made me happy that I had picked one of the most expensive subdermal armour systems there was, not because it was so much better at ballistic protection but because it had top-of-the-line radiation shielding built in, and in a way that didn't make my skin look ridiculous, like the Michelin Man. You could definitely tell I had subdermal armour, but it looked like a normal armour install.

It was actually marketed towards workers in high-radiation environments like space, but even those working around neutron sources, too. It couldn't completely stop gamma and it could only moderate fast neutrons, of course, but it provided very good protection against most other threats. Perhaps it would make me opaque to scanners, too, although I still didn't know precisely how scanners worked, except that they weren't actually ionising like old-fashioned X-rays, so they were safe to be exposed to repeatedly and even continuously. That was something I kept meaning to study so as to help myself make hidden implants, but it was also something I never quite got the time to pursue.

We docked at the actual O'Neil cylinder instead of one of the many orbiting space stations, and I got out. I could immediately detect the false gravity. Although they were called O'Neil cylinders, the truth was that they took some liberties with the term. A true O'Neil cylinder should have an internal radius of eight kilometres or more. That had been the initial idea many, many decades ago.

His original idea also included paired cylinders that counter-rotated against one another, using complex series of bearings, all for the purpose of keeping the cylinder pointed at the sun. Extremely mechanically complicated and extremely expensive.

The stations here had no alternating land and window segments, as it was much cheaper to use artificial lighting. Not only could you maximise the useful area inside, but you did not need either a counter-rotating cylinder pair or the complicated bearing system. It was also smaller. Much smaller. Rather than an eight-kilometre radius inside, it was closer to one and a quarter.

Due to the lack of using the sun to power most things, everything was powered by fission reactors, although I had heard that there were plans to try to build a fusion reactor in one of the orbiting space stations and beam power into the cylinder. That would be interesting. Currently, the only commercially available fusion reactor design was about a two-terawatt plant, but you needed over fifty acres, plus a security perimeter, to house it. So, it wasn't really ready for space applications.

Although a mini-O'Neill cylinder, it was still incredibly huge for a space station, but by designing it this small, it became plausible to construct on a limited budget. And it could always be expanded outward, extending the cylinder out. However, this meant that in order to achieve one-g of simulated gravity, the cylinder had to spin at about point eight-five revolutions a minute. This correlated to a tangential velocity, or "rim speed", of over one hundred and ten metres per second.

As such, it was detectable. I could detect that the gravity was coming from spinning, but it was still considered in the "comfort zone" of such structures and people very quickly adapted to living in such conditions. There wasn't a customs entry, per se, but two men met me at the dock and took me into a small conference room.

Like a lot of spacers, especially those in the O'Neill colonies, they had an African phenotype. From my expert eye, I figured it would take at least another one hundred and fifty generations before comparative evolution caused their melanin to drop considerably due to no longer experiencing much UV radiation. Would spacers develop protections from other types of radiation over time?

I shook my head. No. Probably not. Not because it was impossible through evolutionary pressure but because we, as a species, had already eliminated evolutionary pressure. Artificial tinkering of the genome would ensure that they'd have whatever skin colouration they wanted, and the same was true for any artificial biological attempts at radiation protection. Those would come a lot faster, then be proliferated and eliminate any pressure for an evolutionary solution. Evolution was a messy bitch, anyway. It was the age of artificial, not natural, selection, and I was all for it.

"Ms Rahim, I am Kalu Igwe, and this is my partner, Jim," the first man said, and I blinked. I had been getting used to the mostly Nigerian-sounding names that I had heard a lot of lately, and then he threw me for a loop. Jim? Well, okay, "We work for the Republic here, and it's standard to have a chat with new immigrants. We are..."

I had been thinking of how Hana would reply, and this was too good a chance to pass up. I scrunched up my face and said, "Intel weenies."

Kalu blinked, but this "Jim" chortled, grinning. He nodded, "Yeah, precisely."

What followed was a polite interrogation. They already knew a lot about Hana Rahim, including her reason for immigrating, but were double-checking, crossing their t's and dotting their i's. It wasn't entirely counter-intelligence work, either, as they were building a list of things that I had to learn. The Republic would send new immigrants through classes for a few months, paying for it themselves, and would also help me find work, given Hana's stated specialities.

I wanted to groan in frustration when I discovered that there was a huge shortage of cybernetics surgeons and geneticists, to the point where, when they noticed my new cybernetics, including the radiation-shielding dermal armour, instead of being suspicious, they asked me if the doc I used was interested in space. And if so, they'd sponsor them to come up here.

Ah well. I had specifically picked this identity so that it wouldn't be too similar to the work I did as both Taylor and Hasumi, but maybe that hadn't been necessary. Still, it would be interesting to learn entirely new occupations, even if they were somewhat "common." But how common could zero-g vacuum construction actually be? There were certainly fewer people who could build a space station or spaceship in a vacuum than there were doctors on Earth. It was just a question of relative abundance.

It wasn't like I was here because this was my optimum choice, anyway. The optimum choice for this third identity as a hedge was to move somewhere in Europe, with a bunch of resources buried in the ground, and live a quiet life in the countryside.

Living on a space station, even one as large as this cylinder was, I wouldn't be able to quickly rebuild and reclone my first and second bodies if something terrible happened to both of them simultaneously. And there was a good chance I would live on one of the other, even smaller, stations. It would be possible, but not for years, depending on how closely I was watched and how much free time my work gave me.

In the worst case, I might have to leave to return to Earth to do it. Still, I was satisfied. I mean... space! I told myself it was protection in case of a sudden planetwide disaster like a large nuclear war or a gamma-ray burst, but the truth was I just wanted to come up to space now that I had the money to do so.

---xxxxxx---

As I was starting my second week of "space kindergarten", I was also walking into the Konpeki Plaza building again. It felt very nostalgic to see the place, and despite the fact that it was the afternoon, I had just woken up. Synchronising sleep schedules had been a challenge, as the colonies arbitrarily operated on Greenwich Mean Time.

It wouldn't really matter once I finished the schooling, as I could work on any of the three "shifts", but for now, I had to sleep at kind of odd times. The fact that I only needed a few hours of sleep helped a lot, though. So I just took a couple of hours off mid-day as Hasumi and Taylor for a "nap."

I had considered for quite a while what I should wear, and I finally decided to go with what felt most comfortable. Not a full dress like last time; instead, I was going with my "librarian outfit" with the pencil skirt. It looked very Militech, but I liked their subdued colour themes compared to most Corporations. Besides, it was my roots, I supposed. Or at least it had been NC-Taylor's roots, and I had co-opted them when I came here.

I was dressed fairly similar to a lot of people in the lobby of the hotel as well, and I casually waited in line for my turn to be scanned by the security pylons. This time I was carrying a pistol; I would just leave it with the security guy, though.

I walked through the scanning pylons, which immediately flashed red, and I was taken aside, just like last time. "Ma'am, I'm afraid that you will have to—"

He was interrupted by a second man walking up to him and whispering urgently into his ear, which caused him to freeze. He looked at me like I was carrying a bazooka and not a subcompact nine millimetre and corrected himself, suddenly, "Ma'am, my apologies. You may proceed. Your party is waiting for you in the Tavernier Suite on the hundredth floor."

You could hear a pin drop, and I suddenly realised I was the focus of a lot of attention. Not only was I being allowed to carry a piece on, not put a bracelet over my monowire, but I was being directed to the penthouse floor. I didn't like being the subject of a lot of people's attention, but I bared up and managed to avoid blushing with an exercise of will.

This level of treatment was certainly different, though. I guess I had Gram to thank. She had clearly told the people working here to be expecting me.

That I was being allowed to remain armed should have been done to put me at ease, but honestly, it just made me feel more anxious. It was a statement of strength, something like, "I'm not concerned about whatever you have with you."

I should have brought a grenade, at least. I sighed and walked to the elevator.