19

Guadaloop Actual was built in the oldest traditions of mid-orbital-elevator stations. Positioned at the geostationary midpoint of the massive cable that stretched from the surface of the planet to an asteroid fortress counterweight, it was a massive ring around an elevator transfer station.

The ring didn’t rotate for gravity—modern gravity systems meant that was unnecessary—but the structure allowed the orbital elevator to pass through on its way up to its counterweight. A docking station in the center of the ring handled the cars as they stopped and off-loaded their cargo and passengers.

Only a small portion of the cars that crawled up and down the sixty-thousand-kilometer cable continued on toward the counterweight—most were civilian traffic that didn’t need to go anywhere near the battle station.

The entire outer edge of the ring could theoretically act as a dock for spaceships, but tradition put the docks on the upper side, away from the planet. The biggest ships still had to dock at the outside edge, but the entire upper surface was used as docking stations.

And the half-dozen decks beneath that surface were officially the “docks.” A large orbital like Guadaloop Actual would have several million cubic meters of storage in those decks alone, surrounded by spacer hotels and bars and everything else that serviced the transient spacer.

Kira and her people had booked rooms just beneath the main docks area, intentionally putting themselves outside the chaos of those working spaces. Now, however, they headed back into them.

“Ninety-five percent of shipping and ninety-nine percent of passengers are run through the digital exchanges,” Konrad reminded the others. “Most of what’s left is gray at best, with some of it being completely illegal and concealed on ships that are carrying cargos set up through the exchanges.”

“There’s basically two places to look if we’re looking for something nonstandard in a short time frame,” Kira added. “The first is the actual physical exchange office, which is usually right in the middle of the busiest section of the docks. The second is the midrange spacer bars. Cheap bars are where the crews will hang out, but we’re looking for a low-end owner-operator.

“They won’t be in a cheap bar, but they probably won’t be in the nice bars, either.”

All four of them were in civilian clothing—plain shipsuits with jackets, mostly. In Kira’s case, the jacket was real sheepskin leather from her home village over a layer of blaster-resistant webbing. The jacket had stopped blaster fire for her once.

Given that it was a gift from her not-quite-estranged brother, it hadn’t needed to do that to be special to her. She still appreciated that aspect of it—and owed her life to her brother’s paranoia.

“Do we even know what the different bars are going to be?” O’Mooney asked.

“Oh, believe me, they’re easy to tell apart,” Bertoli told his subordinate with a chuckle. He pointed out a sign that they were walking past. “See that?”

“Yeah.”

“So. Small, discreet, sign. Visible from the main thoroughfare, but nothing to draw attention to it, right?”

“Right…”

“So, that’s a top-end bar, probably requires membership in a travelers’ club or something like that,” Bertoli explained. “The top-end owner-operators are in there, as are the captains and senior officers of the big lines. The lines basically subsidize the travelers’ clubs.”

“Oh.” O’Mooney studied the sign for a moment.

“Then if you look over there”—Bertoli gestured, and Kira swallowed a snort of amusement when she saw the faux-neon sign that he was gesturing at—“that is a strip club, probably with an attached brothel. We’re going to call that a culturally cheap bar, even though it’s going to have the same prices as a higher-end drinking establishment.”

The younger commando chuckled.

“So, we’re looking for a place with a clearly visible sign that isn’t neon and has minimal implied boobs and dicks?” she asked.

“Bingo,” Bertoli said. The mercenary scanned the hallway they were in—a triple-wide, double-high corridor that likely encircled the entire station on this level—and then pointed down the hall. “Some of them are also restaurants, like that one.” He paused. “What the hell is ‘Tex-Mex’?”

“Classical Earth cuisine,” Konrad said. “So, that’s food and midrange bar. Probably a good place to start. Think they do breakfast?”

“They’re in the docks,” Kira pointed out. “That means you can get any meal you want at any time of day by station clocks. And I haven’t met too many people who can screw up toast and eggs over the years.

“Let’s go grab food and eavesdrop.”

Kira’s preferred breakfast was buried in a smaller, near-hidden section of the menu that was easy to miss next to the glittering pictures of something called “huevos rancheros.”

It wasn’t that the restaurant’s specialties didn’t look good; it was that she was generally quite specific in what she’d risk at an unknown eatery. Eggs on toast were hard to screw up—and this restaurant didn’t.

The specialties that came out to their table a few minutes after they ordered looked good, she had to admit, but her meal looked exactly as she was expecting—and for the first meal of the day, that was important.

Their server was a middle-aged man with a mustache only a few millimeters short of requiring a hair net—probably saved from that ignominious fate by what appeared to be the application of industrial levels of wax.

Kira wasn’t sure if she’d spent too long looking at the mustache or what, but she realized the man was returning her regard levelly.

“Thank you,” she told him before turning her attention to her food.

The restaurant was decently sized, with eighteen tables of various sizes. There were some empty tables, but most of the place was full and there was a quiet burble of conversation for Kira to try and eavesdrop on.

She had to check to be certain that it was actually breakfast time by station clocks—though that didn’t necessarily mean anything for the individual clocks of assorted ships.

“The food is good,” Konrad murmured, keeping his voice quiet enough not to interfere with everyone stretching their headware’s audio processors to listen in on other conversations. “Coffee is…not.”

Kira took one sniff of the cup and chuckled.

“We’ve been spoiled,” she admitted—but she went for the glass of hydroponic orange juice as well. Like the eggs and toast, it was standard the galaxy over. If there was a civilian orbital station in the galaxy that didn’t have a hydroponics farm somewhere, with wheat and oranges in layered tanks, and chickens wandering around the floor to make maximum use of space, she’d never been aboard it.

None of the conversations she was overhearing were helpful. Everyone she could hear was a mid-ranking officer on a line freighter, reporting up a corporate hierarchy and flying on a schedule.

And mostly complaining about said hierarchy and schedule.

“I think this place is a bust, but at least the food is good,” she told her companions, echoing Konrad’s words. “Let’s finish up and see what else we can find.”

“Head toward the exchange office and buy half a dozen coffees on the way?” Bertoli suggested. “We’ll slosh by the time we get there, but it’ll give us a few chances to listen in.”

“Agreed,” Kira said. “I’ll settle up the bill while you all finish.”

The restaurant could have used the station network to handle payments, but that often required a subscription fee. A stand-alone payment terminal, like the one they were using, was a fixed non-variable connection to the network and hence cheaper.

But it required Kira to walk up to the host station and give the terminal mental instructions. Their heavily mustached server was leaning against the host lectern and nodded calmly to her.

“Your bill is loaded up,” he told her, his voice notably higher-pitched than she’d expected. “Good to go.”

That reduced the amount of work she had to do to a single back-and-forth mental confirmation with the terminal. It only took a few seconds, and she gave the server a nod.

“Thank you,” she said again. “Tell your cook they do a good job. We’re not from around here, and we were impressed.”

“Lots of visitors come through here,” the server told her. “I’ll let Cookie know. You’re Apollon, Em?”

“Syntactic Cluster, these days,” Kira said. “Galaxy moves on, you know.”

“That I do,” he agreed heavily. “That I do.”