Grace had been right.
The few humans we encountered on our way through the shopping arcade gave Elaine and I a wide berth and their gaze never rested on me for more than a second or two. Non-humans didn’t seem to care much about us one way or another, but I wasn’t worried about the non-humans. I was too busy adding things to my mental shopping list with every storefront we passed.
It had been a long quarter living in two sets of clothes and one set of shoes. I missed my tablet and my jewelry and all the other little things that you don’t realize are so important to your daily wellbeing until you have to do without.
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just start buying whatever I wanted. I turned to Elaine. “So, where’s a good place for luggage around here?”
“There’s a chandlery around here; smaller than the big outfit by the docks, but better quality. It’s the kind of place where officers shop, but anybody who works for Jack can afford them too," she winked at me.
I bumped into her side on purpose. “You don’t have to keep selling me on the job, but yeah. That sounds right.”
She laughed, but took point and led me to a little mom-n-pop sized storefront tucked down the corridor from the big flashy corporate shops. It looked like it had been there since the station had rolled out of the shipyard. A scent of leather and wood polish lingered just outside their entrance.
A bell jingled somewhere as we walked in through the open front of the store and a young woman popped up from behind a shelf she’d been stocking. “Welcome! Let me know if you need help finding something or when you want to check out, okay?”
“Will do," Elaine promised. She looked to me. “Want to meet up at the register when you’re ready?”
“Yeah.” I looked around. The shop was well stocked with their shelves organized by type and little placards giving weight estimates of each product. I could see a set of scales near the register. No danger of going over my mass allotment here. “I’ll try to be quick.”
“Take your time. We’ve got all day.”
My first order of business was finding a trunk. I’d inherited my old one from an elder dockhand when I was just starting out and it had been as low tech as you could possibly get. It had started out with wheels, but those were long gone by the time I got it.
The trunks I found didn’t have wheels either. They had electromagnetic lifts and, according to the tags, they synced up with your band and followed you around. If they got out of range then they’d drop and clamp down onto the floor until someone with a security badge came by. They were lightweight, but space-rated for up to thirty days in a hard vacuum. In the event of an emergency, my luggage would have a chance of surviving longer than I did.
I huffed a laugh and picked one out.
It was weird, shopping with preference in mind rather than necessity. In the past, I’d bought as little as possible as cheaply as I could. I still couldn’t be all that free with my money. My mass allotment was actually a little smaller than what I’d enjoyed on Mimir, but with my pay I could spend a little extra for ultralite materials.
I could hardly imagine not having to worry about breaking my toothbrush or something two weeks away from port, but I was ready to find out.
Elaine was cruising a news terminal near the register when I caught up to her, laden down with toiletries, a new tablet, and storage sticks loaded down with three different entertainment archives.
“No clothes?” she asked, looking over the stack I laid down on the counter.
“Not here,” I looked at the girl who was sorting through my stuff. “No offense.”
“None taken," she assured me. “I don’t shop here either.”
I looked her over. She was wearing a suit, but it was better fitted than most with artistically placed panels of textured material and little decorative elements. I liked it. “Where do you shop?” I asked.
She barked a laugh. “I fab my own stuff, but I can tell you where I get my designs. Tell me your band code and I’ll shoot you a link to the archive. You might need some supplemental material cartridges. Not all the stuff in the database uses standard feedstocks.”
Print-your-own clothing was hardly a new innovation, but not everybody liked to wear things that had been printed flat. Cassandra had good printers, though, since they fabbed a lot of their own parts. Mimir had too, but the crew only got access to the cheapest, most bare-bones printers. Grace didn't let everyone have free access to the printers either, but you could request things and Brando would print them from your feedstock allowance.
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I took the shop clerk's advice and bought a few digital archives with clothes I liked the look of. I let my auxiliaries make a list of any specialized feedstocks I'd need and placed an order with the chandlery for delivery to the ship.
From there, we went to the salon that Elaine had been talking about. It was on a different level than the spacer dock and located in an ornate freestanding building designed to look like a waterfall fountain with sheets of lightly-tinted liquid flowing down the facade from rough stone columns. I tentatively recognized the liquid as diluted cleaning fluid and realized that the architect had hidden the building's external self-cleaning feature in the waterfalls. Unless I'd missed my guess, every inch of the exterior could be reached by the waterfalls. They just didn't have them all on at the same time. The cleaning fluid collected around the base of the building in a small moat that perfumed the air with flowers as you entered the lobby.
Clever.
A middle-aged woman came from the back to greet Elaine.
"Sweetheart! It's been ages," she cooed, exchanging air kisses with my crewmate. "I saw Casssandra on the docking list this morning and hoped you'd turn up at my door. How is your mother?"
"Still on tour in the Mid-Core," Elaine said, returning the kisses. "She has a new lecture series and it's going well. This is my friend, Sinope Ananke. She just got off a strict assignment. Do you think you can help her?" She turned to me. "Sin, this is Ava Bel. She's one of the best stylists I know."
"'One of'", Ava huffed. "To be damned by faint praise like this! Yes, love, I am 'one of the best' stylists in the sector."
Ava circled me, "I think 'strict assignment' is overstating it. Otherwise, I can't imagine why one of Jack Grace's people just walked into my studio in an open access jumpsuit and a full spacer crop—unless this is your preference?"
"No," I chuckled. "My last posting changed captains suddenly. The new captain didn't want anyone having hair to interfere with their helmet seals so we all got shaved. I have a picture of what my hair used to look like."
I shared with her a copy of my last personal holopic, which I'd taken for Lupa at her request before she left to pursue her independence. In it, I had short, wavy pink hair with curtain bangs. The pink wasn't natural. My real hair color was a nondescript brown that showed any chemicals in the wash water immediately by turning orange or green. I used to use a rinse to make it brown again, but switched to a happier color when I realized I was going to be color treating my hair every few weeks anyway.
"Lovely," Ava cooed, turning the holo in the air in front of her and comparing it to the two centimeters or so of hair I'd managed to grow during the passage from Fjord Orbital to Elladan stattion. "Yes, we can re-create this. You have enough length for strand extensions. There will be a slight crease in your texture as your natural hair grows out again, but I'll give you a rinse that will wash out joins between your strands and the extension caps once you have enough length.
Ava hurried us into her private studio and did a few scalp treatments on both of us before she set me up with a specialized bot to apply my extensions while she worked on Elaine's head.
I walked out of there with hair for the first time in months. Ava had done an amazing job in replicating my natural texture. She'd also gone after my eyebrows and upper lip with an artistic fury before putting me into a thick jelly mask laden with cosmetic nanobots that finished what Doc had spent the entire month trying to accomplish and fixed my sunken, sallow complexion.
I actually recognized the woman in the mirror when Ava showed me the final results.
Elaine, meanwhile, had swapped her curly red bob for a pale teal undercut and had had Ava refresh her demi-permanent eyeliner with little blue dots under the corner of her eyes.
"So, you come here every time you're on station?" I asked, as we left Ava with our most sincere thanks and a massive tip.
"Pretty much. I only get touch-ups once or twice a year and that tends to correspond to when we come through here." Elaine smiled as she looked me over. "You look happier. Feel better now?"
"I do, yeah. Thank you for bringing me here."
She nodded and grinned. "I'm starving now. Let's drop your trunk back at the ship and get something to eat?"
I nodded. "My treat."
Back at the ship, I found I had a weird problem.
"What do you mean I'm only at 25% of my mass allotment?" I asked, once Brando had got done weighing me in. "I should have 45 kilos of stuff here. The allotment is 80 kilos, right? I should be a little over 50%."
I looked at Elaine, who nodded in surprise.
Brando frowned as he started pulling up screens and digging into the actual meat of the report. Usually, whoever was on watch could rely on the computer to accurately report allocations. The shipboard AI might not be sentient, but it was still a reliable auditor.
"Ah," he said, after while. "It's your feedstock allowance. It's bigger than usual. I'll have to check with the captain, but you may get extra feedstocks for the bots."
That had never been the case before, but I supposed it could be possible. I'd never been the only driver aboard a ship before and there'd been another one before me; that J.Armsa guy. Had he negotiated for extra mass as part of his hiring?
"I mean, I'll take it if it's accurate," I said, still feeling a little dubious. It was still weird that the extra allowance was tied to my personal belongings rather than the botshop.
"You can leave the trunk here," Brando said with a chuckle as he waved them off. "I'll haul it over to your cabin when Coro relieves me. You girls go have fun."
My auxiliary, the one who'd been extra active all day, forwarded me a list of well-reviewed lunch spots—including some old-earth curry places. Nice.
I turned to Elaine. "Have you ever been to Indigo Veda? Is it good?"
She blinked. "The curry shop? Yes, I have. It's pretty authentic, actually. Can you handle heat?"
I grinned.