The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

course, the communications problem wasn’t with the Presidio, who barely got off a single we need help; we’re docking soon communiqué before their entire communications array went down. No, the problem was with Repair and Maintenance. Some idiot there forgot to inform Hunsaker that his resort would soon be full.

      Not that the Vaadum Resort and Casino was much of a resort. It was more of a Hail Mary Pass. If you were passing through the Commons System (which was what most people did in the Commons System—pass through) and for some reason you needed to exit your luxurious spaceship for some downtime and you couldn’t wait the extra day to go to Commons Starship Resorts—which were real resorts, by the way, on full size space stations—then you ended up at Vaadum Resort and Casino.

      Hunsaker liked to think of Vaadum as a bit of a surprise. Vaadum was on the Vaadum Outpost, which predated the Commons Space Station by nearly two hundred years and looked it. Small, cramped quarters, a docking ring that couldn’t accommodate most modern ships, a repair shop that was catch as catch can, a resupply warehouse that sometimes needed resupplying itself, and of course, the Resort.

      Which, when Hunsaker bought it, was a seedy little rundown motel, operated by the repair crew, who learned (accidentally or so the histories said) that ships in distress often couldn’t house their passengers. Better to place those passengers in a paying room than having them bunk on top of tables in the cafeteria.

      Hunsaker was manning the front desk because sixteen minutes didn’t make up for the six months during which he had neglected to upgrade the automatic check-in system. He hadn’t cleaned the rooms in six months either—or at least, not all of them, nor had he checked the environmental systems.

      He sent his entire staff—all two of them—off to dust, change linens, and ensure that each room had both oxygen and some sort of livable temperature while he scoured the entry, trying to make it somewhat presentable.

      The Repair and Maintenance crew told him that the Presidio had twelve passengers and four crew members, so he would need a minimum of eight rooms, but it would be better to have sixteen.

      It would be better to have all thirty rooms cleaned and livable, but really, where was the percentage in that? He had three functioning rooms at all times, and two of those were rarely full. The regulars that came through—and there were regulars, although not always the best of regulars—came for the casino, which had the only living breathing human dealer in the Commons System.

      She was fifty percent fake. He didn’t test the fifty percent theory or which part about her parts was rumor—although he did know that her breasts literally sparkled because she often dealt topless (hence the repeat audience).

      She was bit too vulgar for him. Vaadum Resort and Casinos was a bit vulgar for him, and quite low scale, and if someone asked him, he would have admitted that the entire enterprise had irritated him when he arrived, but didn’t bother him so much now.

      His standards had lowered, not because of the place, but because he didn’t really deserve better.

      He was just coming to terms with that.

      The entry was the largest room in the Resort, not counting the restaurant or the casino. The entry had bench seats, no-die, regrow plants that he’d bought early in his tenure here and regretted ever since, and a large faux marble floor that, when he bothered to faux polish it, shined like a million bright stars.

      He managed to clean the dust off the benches, prune the regrow plants so that their branches no longer took up most of the stairwell, and set up a make-shift computer system to handle the new guests, all in fifteen of his sixteen minutes. But he hadn’t tried to clean the floor and he was grateful for that as the passengers of the Presidio pushed and shoved their way through the double doors.

      All human (thank God for small blessings) and all sizes, the twelve passengers from the Presidio smelled—not so faintly—of burnt plastic. A few had smoke lines across their faces, and another few wore tattered clothing.

      They also stank of sweat and fear and had that wild-eyed look of people Who Had Been Through It All And Weren’t Yet Sure They had Lived To Tell About It.

      He had seen so many people like that over the years, and they were always distraught, always needy, and always demanding. He loathed demanding customers, even though his high-end education had prepared him for them. Once upon a time, he was the best at dealing with the most difficult of guests, back when he actually worked in a real resort that catered to the very wealthy, who, at least, were predictable in their very disagreeability.

      He peered at the sea of humanity before him—well, all twelve of them anyway, which felt like a veritable sea to him, considering he probably hadn’t seen twelve people all in one place since the last ship disaster nearly a year before. These people, with their untended hair and their air of complete panic, stared back at him as if he were their only savior.

      He smiled unctuously—and he hadn’t managed that expression in nearly a decade—and nodded his head to the first person in line.

      She was a stout elderly woman, wearing a black business suit (now decorated with several rips to the right side) and matching sensible shoes. She even had a little hat perched on top of her graying curls. That hat looked like it was an afterthought—one of those things she had grabbed automatically as she fled the ship just to make herself presentable.

      “Agatha Kantswinkle,” she said with one of those operatic voices (complete with vibrato) that certain older persons cultivated. “I should like a single room.”

      She did not say please, nor did he expect her to. In fact, she raised her chin after she spoke to him.

      She, at least, was a type he could handle.

      “We only have a few rooms, madam,” he said in his best toady voice. “You’d be more comfortable if you shared a double.”

      “I would not,” she said. “I shall not ever room with any of these despicable people.”

      She leaned forward and whispered—as best an operatic voice could whisper, which was to say not at all—and confided, “There are murderers among them.”

      A middle-aged man in the middle, face covered with soot, rolled his eyes. A younger woman toward the back raised her gaze heavenward—if there were a heaven in space, which there was not. Still, Hunsaker didn’t miss the gesture. Or the grimaces of dislike on the faces of the other passengers.

      “Surely, it wasn’t as bad as all that, madam,” he said as he opened the file on the old-fashioned built-in screen on his desk. The comment was somewhat reflexive. He hated histrionics. But it was also geared toward the other passengers upon whom, he was becoming certain, he would have to rely to keep Agatha Kantswinkle under some kind of control.

      “Not as bad as all that?” she repeated, slapping a palm on the desk, making his computer screen hiccup and nearly blip out. “Are you mad, man? When we left the Dyo System, we had fifteen. Do you think they stepped off the ship mid-flight? I think not.”

      Hunsaker raised his eyebrows and looked over her shoulder at the other passengers. The man with the soot-covered face shook his head slightly. The young woman had closed her eyes. A few others were looking away as if Agatha Kantswinkle’s behavior embarrassed them.

      He decided to ignore the woman, which meant getting her away from his desk as quickly as possible. “We have a single room, madam,” he said, “but it’s tiny. The entertainment system needs upgrading and the bed—”

      “I’ll take it,” she said, handing him a card with her information coded into it, a method as old-fashioned as she was.

      He charged her twice the room’s usual rate and felt not a qualm about it. First (he reasoned to himself), the Presidio’s parent company would probably pay for the extra stop. Secondly, the woman had already shown herself to be an annoyance, and he’d been a hotelier long enough (even at a disreputable place like this one) to know that customers often showed their true colors from the moment they walked in the door.

      He was simply adding