like decorations or status symbols, and they aren’t expected to speak unless spoken to. That is good for the heist we are trying to pull, but bad if everything goes south and I end up getting captured and sold to one of these aristocrats.
A habitat is a big floating city, as Thraxa explained it to me. I have seen stuff like that in sci-fi movies, so I think I get the idea.
Once our ship is actually in range of the habitat Summer’s Breeze, I realize I didn’t quite get it until I saw it with my own eyes
The habitat isn’t so much a floating city like I imagined. I thought it would be mostly like a big building in space. Instead it’s a giant tube, and it has big windows on it to let sunlight through. Each window is probably a mile wide. The city isn’t a bunch of rooms inside of a building like I thought. The buildings and the grass and the lakes and streams are all on the inner edge of the tube. Stuck to the inside as the tube spins. It’s like a whole planet...just a really small one.
“How does everything stay on the ground?” I ask. “Shouldn’t it all float away? We’re in space.”
“The whole tube spins,” Krakon says. “It simulates the gravity of Cygnus, which is about the same as Earth. It’s like an amusement park ride that sticks you to the wall as it spins, just much, much bigger. The wall is the ground.”
“Won’t that make us dizzy?”
He shakes his head. “When it’s this big, you don’t feel dizzy. You’ll forget it’s even spinning.”
We get dressed, which means getting disguised and into character.
Krakon is now Dathros Mi Eukarion. “Mi” is some kind of aristocratic title, and “Eukarion” indicates the habitat he is originally from, Eukarios. He’s wearing a pale teal robe with an orange metal clasp on his chest. His orange facial markings have been painted gold. He looks like some kind of alien Roman emperor.
“What is my cover name?” I ask.
“Just use your real name,” Thraxa says. “Less risk of you accidentally saying the wrong one. Catherine sounds human enough.”
“It is human,” I say.
Thraxa shrugs “Well, then. Just don’t call Dathros by the wrong name.”
“Who?” I ask.
She glares daggers at me, and I laugh nervously.
“I was just joking.”
“No joking on Summer’s Breeze,” she snaps.
Thraxa is going to pretend to just be a hired transport ship. She won’t even go onto the habitat with us. She’s instead going to come down later, after Krakon has found the spear and scanned the defenses. She’ll be the one who actually steals the thing, which is fine by me. Maybe if she gets caught, we won’t even go down with her?
The ship’s engines cut off as we approach the hab’s docking port, and zero-g comes back. My stomach lurches at first, but I’m used to it now, and I follow Krakon to the cargo bay.
I’m wearing a simple white dress with a golden belt. There are a few ornamental markings on the dress, but it’s mostly just tight and partially see-through. If you let your eyes linger, you can see my nipples. They explained to me that any ornamentation distracts from my pure human form. I’m supposed to be eye candy, but not gaudily decked out with jewelry or other ornamentation.
We have a big case with some other stuff in it, but Krakon packed it, and I have no idea what else we’re taking with us. I just hope that the case isn’t full of guns, bombs, and swords.
From the docking port, we travel to the spine of the habitat. It’s a long corridor that runs all through the middle of the tube. We float through it in zero-g and take an elevator down to the surface. Technically we’re not going “down.” There’s no real down, because we’re inside of a tube in space. I decide that “down” is anything that is going from the center toward the surface. So “down” is subjective, but this elevator that is taking us from the center of the tube to the buildings below is taking us down, toward the spin of artificial gravity.
As the elevator goes down, the spin starts to do its job and we float to the ground, getting heavier as we go lower.
“We have forged documents,” Krakon says. “The swarm is very, very good at forging documents.”
“You’d have to be, I guess. And good at lying.”
He puts a hand on my waist, and I can’t help