The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

and gave her his best fake smile.

      “Your room, madam,” he said with a nod, “is up those stairs to the left. It is the only room off the first landing.”

      Because it used to be a maid’s room, back when the resort had actual dreams of grandeur, in the days just after its first construction, long before he was born.

      She did not thank him and mercifully did not ask him how she would unlock the door. He handed her the door’s code, but it was a mere formality. The lock had broken long ago.

      As she made her way toward the stairs, he processed four other passengers—real, sane, sensible people. They had all of their information coded into their fingertips like proper human beings, and they were solvent, which was good, since he debited their accounts immediately, although he didn’t overcharge them (too badly) like he had Agatha Kantswinkle. People who were in a hurry to get to their rooms, relax and try to forget whatever it was that brought them to this godforsaken place.

      Hunsaker was beginning to think that the rest of the check-ins would go well, when the soot-faced man approached the desk. He was taller than Hunsaker, but bent slightly, as if embarrassed by his height—which Hunsaker could well understand, since so many distance ships were not built for the egregiously tall.

      “Sorry for the old lady,” the man said as he extended his index finger, the only clean one on his hand. “We’re really not that bad a bunch.”

      The finger, touching the screen, identified him as William F. Bunting, Bill for short, who began his journey in the Dyo system just like Agatha Kantswinkle. His occupation listed varied, which usually meant unemployed and searching for work, but he had nearly two dozen stellar (no pun intended) recommendations, so perhaps his occupation truly was varied and he had traveled from job to job as he traveled farther and farther from home.

      “Sounds like you’ve had a difficult trip,” Hunsaker said, offering the platitude the way another man would grunt with disinterest.

      “You don’t know the half of it,” Bunting said. “If you had any other ship docked here, I’d request a transfer.”

      “Perhaps one will arrive while yours is being repaired,” Hunsaker said, debiting Bunting’s account, which looked full enough—especially for a man who had listed “varied” as his occupation.

      “Please God,” Bunting said, and sounded serious, which caught Hunsaker’s attention.

      For a moment, their gaze met. Then Bunting said, “I know you don’t have a lot of single rooms, but you probably should give me one.” He swept his hands toward his shirt. “These are the only clothes I have, and even I can smell the smoke on them. In a closed space, I’m not going to be someone people want to be around.”

      Even now, in a not-quite-so closed space, Hunsaker could smell him. Hunsaker had figured the stench was the accumulated odor of all of the passengers, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was Bunting all by his egregiously tall self.

      “We have a boutique,” Hunsaker said, as if the little room stocked with clothes others had left behind really qualified as a fancy store. “I’ll open it in two hours. I’m sure you’ll find something to accommodate you there.”

      He made a note to go to that little room and run the clothing through the automatic cleaning equipment yet again. He had no idea when someone had last picked through the material. At least he’d figured out that he should display it all, and that no one would know that it had been previously worn.

      “Thank you,” Bunting said, and pulled forward a slightly pudgy balding man. “In that case, we’ll share a room.”

      The slightly pudgy balding man didn’t seem disconcerted by this. He looked grateful, in fact. Hunsaker took his information, also stored properly on his index finger—Rutherford J. Nasten—and sent both men to the best ventilated room in the entire wing.

      Hunsaker kept processing until he got to the young woman in the back, who, luck would have it, got a single room simply because Agatha Kantswinkle had demanded a single room and there were only twelve passengers.

      “All I have is a room we call the Crow’s Nest,” Hunsaker said. “It’s small, but it’s at the top of this part of the station and it has portals on all four walls.”

      “That sounds good,” the woman said tiredly.

      “Sounds like the trip from hell so far,” he said, actually interested for once, partly because she was so reticent and partly because she had been so expressive earlier.

      “You don’t know the half of it,” the woman said, touching his screen with her left thumb. She was security conscious, then, not willing to follow the norms on how to behave.

      It took a moment for the screen to display her information, almost as if it were tired of doing all the hard work, and for a moment everything blurred. Or maybe that was his eyes. He was unaccustomed to dealing with people any more, and even less accustomed to the level of tension he had felt since the passengers had arrived.

      “Breakdowns can be stressful,” he said, as he monitored the information in front of him. The light above hit her face just right so that it reflected into the screen, making it seem like her information had come up superimposed over her image.

      Susan G. Carmichael, daughter of Vice Admiral Willis Carmichael of the Dyo system. Hunsaker tried not to raise his eyebrows at her pedigree. A woman like this should have been upset at the meager nature of his resort, yet she didn’t make a single complaint. Maybe she would make up for Agatha Kantswinkle.

      “The breakdown was terrifying,” Susan G. Carmichael said, her voice soft. “There was actually a fire.”

      That caught his attention. Ships had come here that had suffered melting in the systems, ships that had filled with smoke in an instant, ships that had lost power, but none had suffered from a fire. Fires were relatively easy to kill. All it would take was a momentary shutdown of the environmental system. No oxygen, no fuel; no fuel, no fire.

      “A bad one?” he asked.

      Her gaze met his. Her eyes were a shade of goldish brown that he hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t sure if it was natural.

      “They didn’t catch it right away,” she said.

      He stopped processing her information. “How could they miss that?”

      “Apparently systems were already malfunctioning.” She swallowed visibly. She was clearly still terrified and covering it up by pretending to be calm. “We were lucky that you were so close.”

      He hadn’t realized—well, how could he have realized anyway, when he only had sixteen minutes to take a nearly empty (neglected) resort and turn it into a place where people could sleep somewhat comfortably.

      “Do they know what caused the fire?” he asked.

      “I’m not sure they know anything about anything,” she said as she squared her shoulders. “What do I need to get into my room?”

      Finally, someone asked the logical question. Perhaps the others had been too traumatized to think of it, or to overwhelmed to care.

      “Just touch the door,” he said. “I keyed it to your fingerprint.”

      Not that it mattered. He really did have to get the locks fixed first.

      “Thank you.” She slipped away from the desk, then stopped. “I heard you mention a boutique…?”

      He shrugged, feeling honest for the first time that day (maybe the first time that year). “It’s more of a whatnot shop. But we do have clothing.”

      “Anything is better than what I have,” she said, and gifted him with a small smile before heading up to her room.

      He stayed in the reception area for another few minutes, staring up the stairs. The hotel felt different with people in it. He’d often thought of the hotel as a chameleon, coloring itself with the attitude of its guests.