Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,15

through the plans. The medical facility took up the entirety of the inner-most ring, or, using reference points based on the feeling of gravity, the “top” floor of the habitat. Outward from there spread a mix of commercial and industrial zones, with a few residential quarters mingled in. Most of the mid-zone space was dedicated to residential space, thousands of quarters crammed into the corridors and passageways. The outer ring was almost entirely taken up by either habitat administration or ship docking and warehousing facilities.

I didn’t have a firm destination in mind, except out. Out of the medical facility, and, as soon as possible, out of Prospect. I needed answers, and to get them, I was going to have to find the rest of the Persephone’s crew. If they’d been aboard the habitat, Sarah would have tracked them down already. Which meant I needed to make my way to the outer rings.

I glanced at the mirror. The clothes the med center had provided screamed re-coil: cheap synthetic fibers, square and blocky cut, and the finest jumpsuit style. All in a drab gray that could only be suitable for hospitals or prisons. My brief encounter with the assassin had been bloodless, so I didn’t have that to worry about, and the synthetics had the advantage of being almost impossible to rip or tear. I took a moment to straighten the jumpsuit and run my fingers through my hair. The face staring back at me was still unfamiliar and looked like it would be right at home on a wanted vid, but apart from some emerging bruising around the throat, it didn’t look like someone who had just killed a man.

I gave the assassin one last glance, and then slipped from the bathroom. I slid the door shut. It wouldn’t latch, but it might buy me a few extra seconds. I crossed the small hospital room and stepped out into the corridor. Sarah added a glowing line to the map in my view, defining the path to the nearest elevator that would take me away from the med facility and the body I was leaving behind.

I drew a deep, steadying breath, wincing some as I felt my aggrieved rib shift. But the coil really was top-notch, however it looked, and I could tell the repair nanites had already gone to work. The pain was quickly lessening. I drew another breath and stepped into the life of a fugitive.

I made it out of the medical facility and into the lift without any difficulties. I cycled through the schematics Sarah displayed, finally settling on a commercial ring four segments rimward from the hospital. The lift shuddered into motion, seeming to descend, though I knew “down” was really toward the rim of the rotating torus.

When the lift stopped, the doors opened on a scene that had probably played out in a thousand different cultures throughout the course of human history. “Commercial district” was too grand a description for the shouting and squabbling press of humanity that milled about before me. “Open-air market” would have been closer, if it wasn’t for the fact that the overhead prevented anything from remotely resembling “open air.” It also thickened the smell—not that the people pressed into the narrow spaces between the stalls were unclean, but the concentrated press of humanity living in confined spaces had a fragrance that every spacer came to know.

Prospect, as its name implied, owed its existence to one corporation’s hare-brained idea that they could successfully mine the surface of Venus. It had been a fool’s dream—with a surface temperature of nearly five hundred degrees Celsius the logistical challenges were near insurmountable. That hadn’t stopped them from building the station and pushing forward anyway. In the end, it had bankrupted the company, but Prospect station had persisted. It had always attracted a boisterous crowd of would-be entrepreneurs, the kind of people who were always looking for an angle, and had a reputation within the Venusian Consortium as a place where hopeless romantics walked shoulder to shoulder with cutthroat corporate raiders. I couldn’t get off of it soon enough.

I pushed my way into the throng, ignoring the calls from the vendors that their wares were of superb quality and priced to sell. My mind kept going back to the assassin. Why send someone to kill me? Murder still happened, of course. No matter how far humanity had come, we still couldn’t shake off all our baser urges. And the overcrowding and other conditions on most habitats could