Hi all, if this story seems familiar, please see my note on Part 1!
Hope you enjoy, no sex in this part but there is some nudity and flirting.
If you'd like to see AI generated renders of the characters, places, etc., please check out my DeviantArt (awalters060), no account or any nonsense needed to view them.
Hope you enjoy, and leave a comment!
By the end of the trip, Karo was sick of the
Aurora
. It was a beautiful enough ship, but it was clearly designed for these short-haul travels. The recreation options were limited, and there was only so much time one could spend on the viewing deck watching the lights of FTL travel. He'd tried chatting to a few other people but it was pointless, and the gym was laughably small. At one point, out of boredom, he'd wandered down to the economy class area and realised how spoiled he was. There was no individual cabins, just corridors with bunks in the walls, and no shower facilities. The
Aurora
could carry several hundred people in Economy, and while it was extremely uncomfortable, no trip ever lasted more two days for an Economy passenger - they legally couldn't book a longer trip without taking a break at stations. First Class were allowed up to a week before needing to get off the ship.
Karo didn't know if he'd be able to last a week without a friend or someone to talk to. But thankfully he didn't need to.
He walked down the airlock corridor with a half dozen others, the only people leaving in Lacaille on this trip. They were all well-dressed, and two were younger, nervous-looking girls - graduates like himself, Karo figured.
They reached the airlock and were waved off by an attendant, taking their first steps onto Lacaille's main station, Moros. Karo couldn't help but gasp.
He'd seen Moros from the outside as they'd approached - a large, bulbous cylindrical core with four rings placed at equidistant spots. Dozens of drones and small craft zipping around it. It was huge, but in space scale could be difficult. Inside was a different story.
It was
huge
.
The airlock didn't open on another corridor, it opened out into the ring, a kilometre in diameter at least. The far side, the inner wall of the ring, was made up of buildings and walkways, all cuboid and rectangular yet sleek and stylish. A suspended glass tunnel hung suspended by anti-grav in the middle of the ring, a train shooting through it as he watched. Beneath the floating train-tunnel was a park, with elegant trees - both holo and real - and a river, fed from waterfalls that fell from above. Karo stared at the nearest waterfall - it poured down in a perfect sheet, splitting smoothly into a perfect crescent that ringed the train-tunnel yet didn't touch it, before pouring down elegantly into the river.
People were around, but nowhere near as many as Karo expected. Some were walking, or riding open-air hovercars. A few couples and small groups wandered by the river on the lush, dull red grass. Drones were far more common, zooming around above or trundling past on skids and wheels.
The cost of this place would be insane
, Karo thought. The amount of water in the river, the antigrav for the entire track, the large buildings with windows and terraces, and the plants - and this was one ring! Of four! What the hell did they have the central cylinder?
There were two men waiting for them - one man stepped forward and shook the hand of a passenger, and they peeled off with the four non-nervous girls. Clearly employees, or something. Karo focussed his attention on the smiling, red-skinned man that was waving.
His clear jacket was edged in a soft glowing blue light, over a black tank top and white, shimmering slacks. His bald head was tattooed with tribal designs, and his teeth were a little too sharp - whether it was personalised gene-editing, or necessary from his homeworld, Karo didn't know.
"Welcome, welcome, graduates! I'm Yan, how're you all going? Good trip?"
Karo and the girls nodded. They looked more overwhelmed than he felt.
"Good good! You all look a bit stunned, very normal, especially after the trip here," he laughed. "So, I'm Yan, like I said. You must be Karo, our new drone engineer graduate?"
"Yes sir," Karo replied, shaking his hand.
"Yan is fine," Yan smiled. "Jess?" he asked the girl next to Karo, a pretty girl of Asian descent but with deep blue hair.
"Yes si - Yan."
"With Finance, nice, nice, and that means you're Riley, with our AI department?"
The last girl looked to be around Karo's age, late twenties, with a sharp face and piercing red eyes. Her hair was shaved on one side, revealing cyberware implants, but otherwise she was nondescript.
"Nice to meet you, Yan," she shook his hand.
"Well, I am so glad you're here! It's nice to see fresh faces, gets dull around here," he winked. "Come with me! I'll show you to your quarters and explain how everything works here."
He set off along the path - and Karo realised it
was
a path, not just bulkhead or a deck. The path was slightly raised, and took them away from the airlock and around what appeared to be warehouses and storage bunkers built into the outer wall of the ring. Their shoes clacked on the white material.
Is this fucking marble?
He thought.
Did they import marble into space for a fucking path?
"So this is Ring One, the bottom ring," Yan explained. "This is residential, essentially. Almost everyones homes are here, as well as some clubs, bars, stylists, that sort of thing. Ring Two, next up, is Agriculture. Our farms, sea, food labs, all there. We don't grow actual food of course, we have our own protein-rich crop that can be printed into just about anything with any flavour. So all food here is perfectly balanced in nutrition, whether it's ice cream or a steak. Eat what you want!"
Karo blinked in surprise. What? How could that be true?
"I'm sorry, Yan, you said
sea
?" Jess stammered.
He grinned over his shoulder. "Blows everyone's mind, that. There's plenty of water in space, what with all the ice asteroids, but collecting it can be costly. Yet we have a sea - it takes up a third of Ring Two. LacGrain is great, and it does a real nice fish, but some of us wanted
actual
seafood, and LacGrain doesn't quite do sushi. So we built a sea."
"Oh," Jess squeaked. Karo couldn't blame her.
"Anyway, Ring Three is Engineering, that's where you'll be a fair bit Karo and Riley," Yan continued as the path took them onto the park and over a bridge. The bridge wasn't even solid - it was a dozen steps, all suspended on their own anti-grav. Karo stared down at a bio-luminescent Koi fish swimming underneath it. "Air-lock hangars for hauling in and processing asteroids, drone works, all the fun toys. Ring Four up top is power, life support, all the less fun stuff. Main work, offices and the like, and the execs residences are in the trunk, the centre cylinder."
By now they were across the bottom of the ring, and their path flowed into a wider one that ran the front of the residential area. The buildings here on the lowest terrace seemed to all be shops, stylists, bars and the like, but they weren't very frequented.
"So all these businesses here are company-run by our Entertainment and Culture department. We hire seasonals, as we call them, to run them. Prices are kept fair and reasonable of course, they're here for staff recreation not to make profit. We import things from all over the cluster, and only keep seasonal's on for about six months. Exception is the gene-mechanics and doctors and the like - the corp pays them
very
well and houses them here with us as full employees.
"Now, no wonder you're wondering how we can afford all this," he grinned over his shoulder again. "We have a bit over a thousand staff - tiny by even large planetary corporation standards. Yet we own a star system. The trick is mining - we mine the asteroids and moons here for materials and manufacture things of the highest grade. Why doesn't everyone do this? Well they do - but those other corporations have to do it in national space, paying taxes, competing, following rules and regulations. The founders of our corporation settled this system
as
a company a century ago, and the canny bastards got it recognised. So now exist like this - all profit belongs to the company, no shareholders. No competition. An entire system of resources and, most importantly, space. Never underestimate the advantage of space."
Karo's head was spinning. A company of a thousand employees...no wonder they needed so many drones. But they were only mining, which didn't need much non-automated control anyway...and all profits belonged to the company...
"So if all profits belong to the company, who decides where they go?" Riley asked.
"Upper management," Yan replied. "But everyone can voice their opinion, and our Board is elected by the employees - so if the execs start skimming too much, they get removed from power. Never needed to do it though - there's only so much money anyone needs.
"Speaking of, we store your pay here, in the bank vault on Lacaille three. We recommend new graduates invest half of their pay in the major Index funds of their home nation, but what you do with the other five mil is up to you."
Karo coughed, and Jess glanced at the other two. Riley spoke up.
"Uh, our pay
is
five mil - which is plenty, of course!" she added hastily. Yan stopped and turned, frowning.
"No, new grads are ten mil," he said. "Hmm, must have been a mistake on the contracts, I'll get that fixed."
