It had taken her a while, but Livvi Mahelt had finally found herself a secluded spot on the station. She sat cross-legged in front of the panel, a window opening out to space, such a tiny gap between safety and the void, and she watched. It could have been called meditation, if her mind hadn't been so frantically occupied with the business of sense ( Read more... )

The station hasn't had so many dead all at once in a long time. There have been equipment failures, scuffles, incidents-but not on this scale. Trying to handle it all through the station's democratic systems has been a mess-committees and subcommittees deciding conflicting thing, and all of it having to happen quick, while the recovered bodies are ( Read more... )

Katriel didn't want to think about the quantity of energy credits this station had to be burning through each day. More than her entire village. Maybe more than all Sehalda itself, on an off day. It seemed utterly, obscenely wasteful to a person raised on a world where scarcity made of it a second currency.

And yet she couldn't call this a rich ( Read more... )

It's been several weeks since Hawke crawled out of a bio-pod to find herself somewhere unimaginable. She thought she knew unimaginable; she was very wrong. A few weeks of being constantly overwhelmed by sights, sounds, and concepts that she's still struggling to comprehend have made that clear. She suspects that's going to go on for a while ( Read more... )

Another night comes to the station. Or night cycle, anyway. And with it come the usual phantasmagorias of sleep... though tonight, there's something special. Here and there might be a shape out the corner of an eye, or a figure glimpsed dimly in the distance. Closer-up it's a thing like an adult, womanly shape, carved out of shadow and specks of ( Read more... )