Devon was very angry.

No, not about having to be posted in the lobby of a transient hotel on the Colossus station; this was just part of a job. Hopestar had to be towed to the service docks and all the transfer passengers were provided rooms for the time being. Devon was one of the stewards who acted as an information link, which meant sitting in the hotel lobby near the free hot beverage machine and browsing outnet through his interface. However, some of his co-workers were angry at being assigned this job because they had plans for the shore leave. Colossus was the former home for many of them (including Shiloh) and the transit station was a town of its own.

(Colossus was a bigger planet than Earth with higher gravity. Therefore, landing Hopestar was inadvisable. Even if it landed without crashing, it would never take off again. Earth was actually on the edge of a landable scale, as Devon understood it. They could have been docking at the Moon’s ring, just like many other liners, but instead they were landing at Bogota just out of spite. Hard to pretend something doesn’t exist, when it’s right there, in the port.)

Hopestar’s time in a service dock wasn’t the reason for Devon’s anger, but it was one of the causes. The way Seidel explained it, starting engine overhauls on Colossus meant they would spend only two full days on Kashi-Sulak. And this was just fucking great.

Devon had big plans for Kashi-Sulak. He convinced Shiloh to take shore leave together at the beginning of the third day so he could show her around the station. He booked two tickets to the Observation Theatre (an actual performance with real people, not pre-recorded projections), made sure the botanical pod accepted visitors on that day, and reserved a table at the Bubble, a tiny restaurant with a transparent dome for a ceiling where you could see the planet rotating above you. It would have been very romantic, and Shiloh would’ve appreciated his efforts, and they would’ve… Well, they would have had a good time together.

Now all of this went into a bin. At least he wasn’t the only one furious with this change. Yes, most were angry about Colossus, but Kashi-Sulak was the first mixed colony station (read, “fun place”) they would be docking at this year. 

Hopestar didn’t have a set schedule, they planned maybe two or three hops ahead. And these past seven months they’ve been cruising around the human SOI (they visited Earth three (!) times, and this was their second arrival at Colossus) with half the cabins empty. He’s been told this was because of a cargo contract; some kind of small company figured out Hopestar’s prices were quite low and decided to take advantage of it and move resources between its new branches on young colonies. They’ve never got as many passengers as they could accommodate inside the human SOI, mostly because a large percentage of them were stamped. Being stamped in human space put a limit on how much you could gain in a year and many couldn’t afford space travel. They’d work for decades in physically taxing jobs just to buy a single ticket to a mixed colony in hopes they wouldn’t starve once there. And if you weren’t stamped, you had all the SpaceShuttles or Comets or private ships to choose from.

Mixed colonies were different. The weird mainstream opinion stated that if Gemi made a settlement on a planet, that planet was lost for humans. The humans would have to leave them or get drowned under all those Gemi babies or something. (Devon had no idea. But “Gemi babies” was a notorious dog whistle.) This was bullshit, of course. Gemi settlements strived not because of their reproduction rates (as much as the government wanted it to be the main reason for humanity failing at building new colonies) but because they’ve never left anyone behind. This meant no silly risks: the colonies were seeded only on the best fitting planets and only if they’ve already gathered enough resources to support it for a couple of decades. So, statistically, if Gemi created a settlement on the same planet the humans had bases on, the planet would become a striving world in half a century. The Gemi part of it, at least.

Human SOI government didn’t like it. It meant less opportunities for building contracts, no monopoly on natural resources, and human settlers, for some reason, preferred to just move to Gemi towns instead of paying huge fees for all their equipment and habitats. Shocking. Knowing this would happen, most of the mixed colonies would get abandoned by human business. No, the contracted supplies would still arrive but regular transit lines would be discontinued. Big companies would close their offices. Administrational services would gradually be defunded. As far as they were concerned, mixed colonies were Gemi colonies. There were no humans there.

It wasn’t true, of course. Humans strived on mixed colonies as much as Gemi did. They built their own habitats and connected them with transport lines while operating on the shared principles with Gemi. And on older worlds, like Kashi-Sulak, they even had infrastructure suitable for both species concurrently. But travelling between mixed colonies was a big problem because Gemi ships were just unbearable for humans unless you could afford enough intoxicants to sleep in a coffin-like cabin all the way through. So when Hopestar arrived, the tickets would get sold out on the day the schedule got posted.

Devon lived on Kashi-Sulak for several years after leaving Earth where he had no chance of doing anything but hard labour. He wasn’t built for hard labour. He also could not access the medical assistance he wanted so much. Kashi-Sulak had private clinics that ignored the stamp, and jobs that paid equal wages to stamped and unstamped individuals. And so Devon soon changed his name (it was actually Dv’n - Gemi for “I can”, which he adapted into a more familiar thing) and got a hormone injector implanted on his back.

Unfortunately, Kashi-Sulak wasn’t free of bigots. You just got paid a bit more than on Earth for dealing with them. And you didn’t have to pay rent.

Great, now Devon was miserable and home-sick.

He checked the passenger board but there were no assistance requests, so he opened the ship board and fired a test ping to Shiloh. She wasn’t showing as online and didn’t read the message. This was expected, she was part of a tour group for the passengers who didn’t want to stay in a room; they hired a guide who was taking them around the station and telling them about the history of the colony. Still, he would’ve loved to just chat with her during the day when he wasn’t stuck behind the counter.

Sharifa was also offline but for a different reason. She was on a supply run with Zulu and a couple of other sturdy stewards; they were probably hawling boxes of cleaning chems from the trading deck to their gate. Devon didn’t envy her, he was glad he was never picked for that because he was relatively small and weak. Also, it’s not like he wanted to talk to Sharifa, his gaze just happened to fall on her name.

A message notification chimed in as he was about to get up and get another cup of a herbal brew. No, it wasn’t from Shiloh. It was… Rin Richard. Huh. They haven’t talked since that first interaction at the cafeteria, and Devon wasn’t necessarily eager to check with the new guy. He seemed nice but Sharifa’s comment made him vary of further interactions. And they haven’t bumped into each other either.

The message read: “Hi, I wonder if you are free to chat. It’s okay if not. Let me know when you’d rather I contact you (if ever).”

Devon read the message several times. Should he expect this to go bad? Well, he could always just block the guy and report him to Seidel who would bring it to the captain. 

“Hi, yeah, pretty free. I thought you pilots had to stay on the ship though?”

“We are. But we’ve docked it and are now stuck in the cockpit with nothing to do :(“

Devon chuckled to himself at this reply. Surely, this guy wasn’t a bigoted asshole others assumed he should be? There was no right or wrong way to get a stamp, what mattered was that you had it. Right?

While he pondered this, Rin sent him another message: “I actually wanted to apologise. For stuff I said in our previous conversation.”

Devon blinked and sent back: “Not sure what you mean. You didn’t say anything that bad.”

Then he caught himself. If Rin said nothing wrong, Devon just leaving randomly like that made him look like an asshole. Whoops.

“I feel like I did. I feel like I was holding desperately onto things that I refused to admit were bullshit just because the alternative would mean admitting I consciously was ignoring the bitter truth.”

“Okay, I don’t want to come off hostile, but did you talk to Dr Bhagooli or something?” Bhagooli was the one medic with a degree in psychology. He was one of the few crew members who didn’t have a stamp. But despite having been married and being a father to three kids back on Earth, he was bisexual. That’s why he was spending his twilight years on Hopestar helping those he felt more kinship with.

“No. I don’t know who that is, sorry.” “I was actually reading these books I got from the library. Started with Mahra Al-Muqit and now on to ‘Forbidden History’ by Jebediah Mu. At first I thought I never knew these things. But then I realised I simply refused to learn them.”

Devon felt silly because there was this whole confession and a serious realisation …but he could only focus on one thing in that message and replied: “Wait, Haasan now gives books to the pilots?!”

“Uhm.” “Others have been surprised too.” “So I guess not??” “But he gave them to me, only made me promise I won't try to get anything for Mikey.” “That’s Thoresson.”

This made Devon lean back in his chair and ponder this fact for a couple of moments. Haasan really hated Andrade, and by extension most of the pilots. Thoresson was known to have gotten the worst of it, but Thoresson was also a chaos incarnate. Was this some kind of a power play on the part of Haasan? If so, was Rin getting himself in big trouble by being a part of it?

He really should not get emotionally invested in this mess.

“I think I’ve heard of Mu but I must admit I don’t read that much. However, if you want someone to just share thoughts with - always ready to listen.”

So they’ve spent the next three hours doing that.