The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

He made himself take a deep breath. The air down here still smelled acrid. He set the environmental controls on scrub, not wanting to smell smoke and sweat for the next week.

      Then he tallied up his single day’s intake. More than he’d made in the last three months. If the repairs took another two days, which was the average time for repairs on this station, he would make most of his year’s operating expenses. If the repairs took longer (and it sounded like they might), he might make a significant profit for the first time in nearly a decade.

      But he would have to endure the mood, and he would have to stay one step ahead of these people. He had to get the clothes ready, open the boutique (such as it was), roust his one remaining chef to work the restaurant, and get the staff to clean a few more rooms just in case the living arrangements didn’t quite work out.

      Not to mention the fact that the ship’s crew had yet to arrive and take their rooms.

      He sighed. He had become even more cantankerous than he had been during the last big shipping disaster nearly three years before. It wasn’t good for him to be so isolated.

      Or maybe it was. Imagine how cantankerous he’d be if he had to deal with these types of personalities each and every day.

      The thought made him smile. Then he continued planning his evening, realizing that to do things properly, he would get very little sleep.

      * * * *

      The boutique wasn’t a boutique, any more than this resort was a resort. It was barely a hotel, although it did have private rooms, which was good enough.

      Or so Susan Carmichael figured. She had hung back after Agatha Kantswinkle had shoved her way to the front of the line, after repeatedly announcing her intentions to have a room of her own as the group fled the ship for the safety of this little bitty place.

      Susan hadn’t been on an outpost this small in years, and certainly not one this old. She was relieved to hear that it had maintenance facilities, but worried that they wouldn’t be up to the task. The Presidio was nearly ruined. It had suffered a catastrophic failure of most of its systems, and that fire had destroyed an section of the ship.

      Destroyed was probably too grand a word. Made that section of the ship unusable, maybe for the rest of the trip.

      Which she would not think about, at least for the next twenty-four hours.

      She had waited the two hours the prissy little man at the front desk had told Bunting to wait for the boutique to open. She knew as well as anyone that the boutique wasn’t a regular store, stocked with purchased merchandise, but a shop stocked with castoffs, leftovers and discards from hotel guests.

      She didn’t care. She had left her own wardrobe on board the ship, and she had instructed the crew to discard most items, even the most personal ones. Although “instructed” wasn’t truly accurate. One of the crewmen—Richard Ilykova—had stopped her in the somewhat disorderly exit off the ship (hell, everyone was pushing, shoving, jostling, trying to get out), and told her that her cabin had been closest to the fire.

      We won’t be able to save your stuff, he said, clearly worried that she’d be angry. But you might find a way to clean it on the station. You want me to set it aside?

      No, she’d said curtly and continued jostling her own way out of the ship.

      She should probably have been more polite. Ilykova hadn’t needed to say that to her. He hadn’t needed to say anything. He’d kept a protective eye on her the entire time she’d been on the ship, and she wasn’t sure if he was attracted or if he thought she was the one who had sabotaged the ship. She had found him attractive if a bit bland—one of those pale blue-eyed blonds who could vanish into the walls because he seemed so colorless. When she’d seen him watching her, she’d decided to keep an eye on him. Maybe he saw that as flirting, or maybe he had just been doing his job. She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure she cared.

      All she knew was that now, she needed new everything, from undergarments to blouses. She didn’t like the idea of wearing someone’s cast-off underclothes, but she didn’t see much of a choice. She would have to ask about guest laundry facilities here, although she doubted there would be any.

      The prissy little man from the front desk had done the best he could to make this small room seem like a store. Some of the clothes hung on racks, with others stacked on shelves along the walls. There were old entertainment pads, some with their contents listed on the back like a directory, and blankets, which surprised her. The blankets looked inviting, even though she was warm, which told her just how tired she was.

      The prissy little man was hovering near the door, checking a portable pad as he kept an eye on her. He had already helped Bunting. Bunting had gone in and out in the time it had taken Susan to look for a single shirt.

      At first, she’d thought the prissy little man a mere employee. He gave off that appearance, a man beaten down by his supervisors, afraid to make decisions on his own.

      But once she got into her room, she’d accessed the resort’s information logs and discovered that the prissy man actually owned the place. He had the kind of pedigree that upscale resorts usually paid excessive amounts to hire—degrees from prestigious business schools and exclusive resort management programs.

      The fact that he was here, and he owned the place, suggested some kind of problem, probably personal. He seemed unimaginative enough to remain in the same business, and not quite bright enough to realize that a resort this far away from habitable planets wasn’t really a resort at all.

      Or maybe he did realize it and fled here on purpose.

      She glanced at him. Dapper, small, furtive, the kind of man (like Ilykova) who could blend into the walls if necessary. Only the prissy little man had another trait—the ability to outsnob anyone in the room. That powerful ability to judge was as important to running a real resort as it was to governance. It made the weak cower.

      It just didn’t bother her.

      She went to the rack holding women’s clothes. She found black pants with no obvious problems, blue pants that needed just a bit of care, a fawn-colored skirt, and a very old white blouse that appeared to have real lace trim. She added four other tops and found undergarments on a back shelf.

      She piled all the items on a nearby table, and beckoned the prissy little man.

      “I know you have a corner on the market,” she said in her most polite voice, “but this trip is turning out to be inadvertently expensive, and so I was wondering if I could get some kind of volume discount…?”

      He didn’t even look up. “The ship’s parent company should reimburse you.”

      Meaning they’ll deal with the much too-high prices. They might not even notice.

      She thought of bargaining more, then decided against it. She wasn’t going to charge the ship for the disaster, but she would take money if the parent company decided to offer it.

      She clutched the clothing, which smelled strongly of some kind of cleaner, and headed toward the door. He said, almost as an afterthought, “The restaurant will be open shortly. Spread the word, would you?”

      As if she wanted to see the other passengers. As if she were responsible for them.

      But she was hungry, and she knew they were too, and all of their rooms were on her way back to the accurately named Crow’s Nest.

      “Sure,” she said, “if you give me something to carry these clothes in.”

      He sighed and reached under a pile of men’s shirts. As she walked back to him, he pulled out a cloth sack—something that looked like a cleaning bag, a low-rent version of a laundry bag that offered to do the cleaning all by itself.

      She was long past caring what it actually was. She put the clothes in the sack, wrapped its drawstrings around her hand, and carried the entire thing to the stairs.

      Dinner, restaurant, the damn passengers. Calling attention to herself all over again.