There Are Many Tokyos In Flower

Chapter 1: Turning About

The sky beyond the port side window was the colour of a broken television screen that still hadn't been unplugged. Speckled with stars, it was a pockmarked and sickly darkness. Pretty as a painting, but as cruel as anything in the verse.

Martin stared out that window — floating inside his five-point harness like a helium balloon stuck inside a roller-coaster seat — and watched the dotted night sky turn clockwise. Like a maintenance crew had come along and just realized a painting had been set upside down, and were in the middle of fixing it.

A few seconds passed as the stars rotated life the hands of a clock, until a small jitter rumbled through what Martin could feel of his seat. A second later, the ship shoved him hard into the chair, and the unnervingly cheerful voice of the ship's AI thundered over the PA system. "Beginning deceleration burn. Our estimated time until docking at Neo Tokyo is one hour and fifteen minutes."

Martin hated that voice. Not that he hated AI voices in general, only that he didn't like letting a programmer add artificial emotional inflection. It might be hard to take the ship's intelligence seriously if it announced they were going to be sideswiped by a rogue asteroid. Which was why it felt like someone slapped him upside the back of his head when it continued speaking. "Mister Rawley, please report to the ship's captain immediately."

"Hope she needs someone to push the eject button while she's standing in an airlock," Martin grumbled, as he stood up and looked over at the book on the shelf. Old school paperback copy of The Dragon Chase, with a bookmark sitting four-fifths of the way through. With barely more than an hour left to dock, he could have finished it, and considered just sitting back down, captain's needs be damned.

"Relaying your suggestion to the captain now," the ship's AI said, in the same gatingly cheerful voice it would probably use to announce it was sucking the oxygen out of the ship in order to kill them all.

"Please don't," Martin groaned.

"Suggestion submitted. I flagged it as ultra-super-duper important so Captain Haberhorn will get it right away," the ship's AI reported.

"Crap." Martin left his book, opened his door, and stepped out of his cabin.

For all the technological marvels that went into a spaceship, the internal layout was so appallingly normal they might as well have taken an inner-city townhouse and stuck rocket engines on the bottom. Martin's cabin was connected to what might as well be a living room, connected to the ship's bridge and galley. The bridge was only slightly more technical than a rich bachelor's den, with plush couches arranged around a view screen about as large as the mid-tier widescreens at most electronics stores. The only distinction given was for the ship's captain, who had a chair that looked like someone stole it from the set of Star Trek.

Stolen, or more likely paid far too much for a replica. Martin climbed the stairs, where the ship's senior officers had their own private quarters. The captain was placed next to the improvised vault room, which along with the nearby bathroom were the only three rooms on the top.

Serious breach of proper security, having the vault room against the ship's hull. Marauders and thieves could access the hall from outside the ship, if they knew where to cut. But the ship's captain and crew hand't been too concerned when Martin pointed it out.

"Haberhorn, you wanted to see me?' Martin called from outside the captain's cabin. The door hissed and slid aside, squinting into the surprisingly dim light.

Unlike the rest of the garishly well-lit ship, Candice Haberhorn's office was illumined almost exclusively by the LED filament strands attached to her hair. The neon-red light from her hair lent the room a menacing, otherworldly quality that more than a few people would probably find menacing.