The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  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.

  Which meant that the hotel was shaken, terrified, and a little bit relieved. 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.

  She wasn’t entirely sure she cared. But one thing she did know.

  She wasn’t going to knock on Agatha Kantswinkle’s door.

  Agatha would want Susan to keep her company.

  Susan wasn’t ever going to do that, again.

  * * * *

  The scream echoed through the stairwell. A woman’s scream, sharp, high-pitched, startled. Cut off in the middle.

  For a moment, Richard Ilykova bowed his head. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with another crisis. He stood in the lobby of the hotel, which was cleaner than some he’d seen on makeshift starbases. The owner, Grissan Hunsaker, looked up from the work he was doing behind the desk, his features contorted with fear.

  No help from that quarter.

  Richard sighed, then bounded up the stairs, feeling his exhaustion in every step.

  The scream didn’t sound again, but he heard footsteps other than his own. Doors squealed open, slammed shut, and voices started.

  He found a group of people clustered on one of the landings—the B Team, he privately called them. The people who had paid lower fares, filling out the ship’s rooms, people who wouldn’t even have gotten on the ship had the owners managed to sell all the tickets.

  In the middle of them, a woman—Lysa Lamphere—lay prostrate on the floor.

  He remembered her only because she was so pretty. Easily the prettiest woman on the ship this trip. But she didn’t have the brains or the personality to match her beauty, which disappointed him.

  Not that anyone who booked passage on the Presidio would look at him. They were all too important for that. Except Ms. Carmichael. She had smiled at him, which surprised him.

  She had noticed him watching her, which had surprised him even more.

  The group stepped back as he approached. Even though they weren’t on a ship any longer, they seemed to think he was in charge.

  Maybe he was.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Dunno,” someone said.

  One of the men—Bunting? Richard almost didn’t recognize in him the new set of clothes he wore—added, “I was in my room when I heard the screaming. Sounded pretty awful, so I came directly here.”

  Richard had no reason to doubt it. Bunting had the unfortunate ability to arrive first in any crisis. Unfortunate only because he didn’t have the compatible ability to know the right thing to do once he had arrived.

  Richard was of the private opinion that Bunting had made the fire on the ship worse by trying to fan it out rather than hit the controls for the room’s environmental system. But Richard was number four man on the crew, the lowest of the low, and he didn’t dare criticize anyone.

  He crouched beside Lysa. She was sprawled on her back, her arms up as if they had been near her face when she had fallen. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and her legs were twisted sideways.

  He touched her face. The skin was soft, silky, the way that skin should be, the way that enhanced skin often wasn’t. Her beauty was natural, then, and even more pronounced when that mousy personality wasn’t front and center.

  She had no fever, and she didn’t look injured.

  Richard glanced up, saw Hunsaker lurking near the stairs, said, “Do you have a doctor?”

  “More or less,” Hunsaker said.

  “What is it?” Richard snapped. “More? Less?”

  “More if she’s sober,” Hunsaker said.

  Richard cursed. “I assume you have basic medical equipment.”

  “Yes,” Hunsaker said.

  “Then get it,” Richard snapped.

  Hunsaker fled.

  The group remained, staring down. These were the people who irritated him. The ones who had wanted the lighting in their room changed and didn’t know how to do it themselves, the ones who woke him from a sound sleep to ask how to work the automatic cafeteria, the ones who thought he was at their beck and call even though, technically, he wasn’t.

  Right now, they were content to let him see
if the woman was all right.

  Hunsaker came back with a handheld medical scanner and a tray of medical pens, each with some kind of magical function. Magical because Richard didn’t know much about medicine, at least this kind. He had some knowledge, but on the other end—how to turn the body against itself, not how to make it function again.

  Hunsaker crouched near him and ran the scanner over her, clearly not trusting Richard with the device, which suited him just fine.

  “I think she simply fainted,” Hunsaker said with surprise.

  “And hit her head?” Richard asked.

  “Oh, she’ll be bruised, but there doesn’t appear to be much else wrong with her,” Hunsaker said.

  Then his gaze met Richard’s, and Richard could tell what the other man was thinking. They both worked service in not-the-best conditions. They both knew that people rarely fainted without a reason.

  “You think, perhaps, she’s finally having a reaction to the trauma on the ship?” There was a hopeful note in Hunsaker’s voice, a note that said, Please, don’t make this my problem.

  “I doubt it,” Bunting said before Richard got a chance to reply. “I mean, she screamed first.”

  Richard closed his eyes for just a second. A brief indulgence, a moment to himself before it all started up again. He’d hoped for an interlude, a bit of quiet, a chance to rest, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen.

  He stood, eyes open now, and looked at the door.

  It didn’t look latched.

  “Is this her room?” he asked, already suspecting the answer.

  “Oh, no,” Hunsaker said. “Miss Lamphere is rooming upstairs with—”

  “Me,” said one of the women behind Richard. He turned slightly. A slender woman with buck teeth stared back at him. He remembered her, because she had propositioned him one late night back on the ship. She’d been drunk, and in her drunkenness she assumed that the ship’s promotion line, which said that the crew was there to serve her every need, apparently understood “every need” to mean every need.

  Her dark eyes met his and a spot of color appeared on her cheeks. She remembered the encounter too.