Shoshone Station: The Galactic Consortium season 2

Episode One: Not a Good Day to Die #11

"Now this is how a shift should go," Melee Sergeant Abhaya said as he looked up at a clock. "Quitting time in five, and barely a peep all day."

"I thought you melee personnel liked a little more excitement," Kellii said with an easy smile.

Abhaya was a short man with bronze skin and dark hair. He was old, gray lacing through his hair and lines on his face. He was still fit and trim. He snorted. "Go work the third shift then. I like me some quiet times," he said.

Consortium security ran four shifts of roughly six hours. The third shift was late evening, early night. Whatever cultural differences they had, some things were the same. Late evening meant the bars were open and petty squabbles were not confined to Earth by any stretch of the imagination. The third watch was often the exciting shift.

"The less people need to call security," Fox said, echoing his own father, "the better job we're doing."

"I am going to like serving under you," Abhaya said with a small bow.

"I agree with both of you," Kellii said as he stood and paced the security command center. "Let the young ones work the evening and night shifts. A few bar brawls will help hone their skills. Let us older, wiser heads make sure the regular citizens are well behaved and get along peacefully."

The afternoon shift was already arriving and preparing for their shift. Shift report took only minutes. There wasn't much to say. Their containment unit had three residents. Fox's nephew Ray would stay for at least a week while they worked out the details of his sentence. Then he'd be free as long as he followed the plan. Two others were Natives that had warrants on whatever reservation they had come from. They had thought they could escape them by joining the station and were now finding out otherwise.

Their complaint sheet was almost as short. The most common complaint was pets. They'd been told they could have small pets. Many of immigrants had dogs and many defied the common sense description of small. Some had taken to the small space and close proximity of others well but predictably some had not. Fox just shook his head. He knew how attached some people were to their pets, but who thought it was a good idea to bring a great dane onto a space station? It was just one of the quirks they'd have to sort out.

The others got to leave to their quarters and whatever social life they had. Fox had one more meeting before he was done. He grabbed a cup of coffee and headed for Lannister's office. The captain wanted to touch base daily for awhile, to get a feel how the transition was doing.

The meeting was brief and uneventful. Fox didn't envy Lannister, whose days were filled with meetings about bureaucratic rules and diplomacy and would be for the foreseeable future.

Afterwards he headed for the Shoshone section. Grandma and Emma had moved up a level, to a small efficiency while maintenance fixed the damage Ray had done with his meth lab. Grandma dragged him into a long hug. "Thank you," she said as she let him go. "I think this is the best, really. For Ray, for all of us."

Fox nodded. "Yeah, honest, it was Lannister not me."

"You always spoke highly of him," Grandma said. "Now I see why. I shall have to make him a batch of tamales."

"Do it, and I'll deliver them personally along with my own thanks," Fox told her. "But not tonight. Tonight take a walk with me. You, too, Emma."

"You thought about what you are going to do on the station, Emma?" he asked as he led them down the hall.

"I was planning on doing daycare for a couple of women, so they could work. Don't know though, don't have room here..." she broke off with a worried look at Grandma. Probably doesn't want to bad mouth Ray, but dammit he left them all in a tough situation.

"They'll fix the other apartment in time," Grandma said. "And I can work."

"Grandma," Fox said. "You've been retired for years."

"And Mrs. Otterdance has promised the tribe will care for its elders," Emma said.

Grandma snorted. "I'm not helpless, yet. I already talked to some guy at the economics office," she said. "He promised me a booth job as soon as they open the bottom court."

"When will that be?"

Grandma shrugged.

Fox took them to a lift and they went up a couple of levels.

"Where are you taking us?" Emma asked, bouncing Tanner on her hip.

"Nine below," Fox said. "Is an open court. Have you seen the open courts they have?"

Both of them shook their heads no.

"Bubbles," Tanner said, pointing out as the door opened.

The open court spanned a couple hundred meters easily, taking up a pie shaped slice of the level. The ceilings were high, here, almost twice the height of a man. Across the wide space were several large rounded structures, the bubbles that Tanner was pointing at. The domes rose to peaks that almost touched the ceiling, giving the vague impression of giant onions.

Kellii's uncle looked like an elderly version of his nephew, grey and a little more gone to seed. He shared Kellii's good natured face and easy smile as he shook Fox's hand. His name was Iwalani. He'd been a cop, too, for years. He'd saved a healthy chunk of his pay and invested in real estate. This was his retirement job.

"Human nature, isn't it?" He said gesturing around the space. "People spend their entire days in tunnels and halls, they don't want to come home to more of the same. That's why so many prefer to live on open courts."

"Gives you the sense of being outside," Fox agreed.

"We sell space by the square," Iwalani said. "The domes are semi-mobile. Move them into position and then root them. You want to move them later, we can do that as well. We sell them individually."

Grandma gave Fox a sharp look. He smiled as innocently as he could. "Well I'm going to be staying here anyway. I want to get out of the tiny quarters I have up on Sixteen Above and you all need a place. I figured a few feet on a court wouldn't be a bad investment."

Iwalani had a model space set up in the middle of the court. The domes were set slightly up on a dais. The dais could be unattached from the floor and the whole unit moved into place and then secured to the floor again. Each was a single room. Emma followed Fox up the stairs, through a beaded curtain and into one of the test models. There was a low bed to one side of the room and long shelves around the edge. It had a window towards the back.

"It's gorgeous," Emma said.

Another dome contained a bathroom with a waterfall shower and abundance of plants growing around the upper most shelves. While they wandered through the domes, Iwalani was showing Grandma an open air kitchen and patio area.

"But what about..." she began and then laughed. "Of course," she said pointing at the roof. "It's not going to rain."

"And the lighting of the upper ceiling," Iwalani said, "is attuned to local time. The entire court will dim around sunset and brighten in the morning. We can throw in a few patio lights. We have a variety of fencing option to give your section privacy."

"What are you thinking?" Iwalani asked Fox as he and Emma joined them.

"I'm thinking three bedroom domes," he began. Before Grandma could protest he added, "and a fourth general purpose room. Ray can use it as a bedroom when he can come home, and Emma can make it into a toy room for the kids she babysits. An open patio kitchen and one of those bathrooms with waterfall, definitely." They had smaller, more basic bath facilities, but Fox really wanted the waterfall. It made him think of Nara Suun and the hotel they had shared on the base ship. I wonder where she is, how her mission is going.

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