Getting closer to the ring didn't make it smaller. If anything it did the opposite, swallowing the whole window until Hikaru couldn't find any sky left around it, just endless silver-blue curve stretching past both edges of the glass.
Suddenly the whole vessel shuddered, then settled with a soft clunk that traveled up through the deck and into his boots, as Maci angled the ship toward a gap along one section of the ring, a berth that lit up green as they approached.
Okay. We're here, wherever here actually is.
A hiss ran along the ceiling above the cockpit, pressure equalizing somewhere in the hull, and then the hatch cycled open onto a ramp leading down into more light than he'd braced for.
He stepped out behind Maci and stopped dead about four steps in.
Sound hit him first, a low continuous roar made of a thousand smaller sounds stacked on top of each other, footsteps and voices tangled with machinery noise, and somewhere beneath it, a thread of noise that might have been music if he listened hard enough.
Sharp metal and ozone came next, a green, growing note underneath both he couldn't place.
Then the sheer size of it, ceilings that weren't ceilings so much as sky, curving up and away until his eyes lost track of where the structure ended and the open space of the ring's interior began.
This is too much information. My brain does not have a folder for any of this.
People moved past him in every direction, more of them than he could count, more shapes and silhouettes than he could sort into any category his brain already had ready.
He didn't try to focus on any one detail for too long. He had no obvious place to start looking.
Maci mentioned the walk to the spire wouldn't take long. He caught maybe half of it, nodding without processing the words, still trying to get his feet to feel like they belonged to him again.
They started walking, Maci setting a pace he had to hustle to match, and it took a solid minute of half-jogging past storefronts before he noticed the sign above one of them wasn't written in Japanese, or in anything he recognized at all.
Wait.
He read it anyway.
The sign advertised repair services, parts, and a warranty policy longer than made any sense for alien tech.
He'd read it as easily as a street sign back home, meaning arriving fully formed the second his eyes landed on the shapes, no pause or lag anywhere in between.
He stopped walking.
He grabbed Maci's sleeve before she could get too far ahead.
"Okay, hold on. That sign. I just read that sign. That was not Japanese."
She kept walking, forcing him to fall back into step or lose her in the crowd.
"Yeah, that tracks. Driver's got a translator built in, best guess. Feeds into your language centers somehow, kicks in the second it bonds. Never actually run the diagnostics myself, but that's the working theory, and it'd explain why you're not standing there confused right now."
She said that like it was a completely normal sentence.
"Wait, it's doing what to my what."
"It rewires your language centers, that's the theory anyway. You're probably fluent in every Coalition language now. Congratulations, probably."
How is that the tone. That is not the tone for this.
"So the translator's just, what, sitting in my head, translating without asking me first? And you don't even know for sure that's what it's doing?"
Maci didn't slow down.
"Pretty much, yeah, near as I can tell. It shouldn't be reading your thoughts or anything creepy like that. Pretty sure it's just language. You'll stop noticing it in a day or two, probably."
"That's not actually answering my question."
She glanced sideways at him, tail flicking once, feet already carrying her forward again.
"Sure it is. You asked what it's doing. I told you. Translating. It's fine."
Whatever the thing running under his skin actually was, it didn't ask permission and it didn't explain itself first, it just handed him meaning already finished, no gap between seeing the shapes and understanding them.
He wanted to push further, but she'd already picked the pace back up, weaving between two aliens carrying a long metal strut between them, and he had exactly two options: keep arguing with her back, or catch up.
He caught up.
The corridor gave way to open space that didn't feel like the inside of a station at all, more like stepping out into an actual city built inside a shell too big to register as a shell.
Buildings rose on either side without a single straight edge between them, walls curving into rooftops curving into walkways overhead, the whole skyline looking grown out of the ground rather than bolted together by anyone's hands.
A canopy of actual trees ran down the center of the wide street ahead, green and full, seemingly unbothered by growing on the inside of a metal ring somewhere in open space.
Okay, that's a park. That's an honest to god park, in space.
People filled the street in numbers that made the crowd back at the ship look like nothing, and it took Hikaru almost a full block to stop trying to guess what species belonged to who.
Scales ran down one man's forearms near a fruit stall, catching the light every time he moved.
A woman two stalls over had a pair of curling horns and was deep in an argument over price with a vendor who had feathers instead of hair.
Further off, near a transit platform, a group of tall, angular figures moved together with an unnervingly unified grace, less like individual people walking and more like a flock deciding where to land.
Maci pointed as they walked, rattling off details out of habit more than anything else, gesturing at a spire rising above the rooftops ahead.
She swept a hand across a cluster of buildings without slowing her pace.
"That's Logistics, over there's Science. Whole ring's about twelve thousand kilometers around, if that number means anything to you. Twenty-two million people living here full time, or close to it, plus a few million more just passing through on any given day."
Twenty-two million. That's a small country's worth of people, just floating out here on a ring.
Maci pointed at nothing in particular, apparently just needing anything to gesture at.
"Fun fact. Depending how you slice the quadrants, you could probably fit your whole Tokyo into one or two of them. Easy~"
That's not a fun fact. That's a war crime against my sense of scale.
He tried to picture it, his entire city folded into some slice of a single quadrant. He gave up almost immediately, the number too big to actually mean anything past the abstract fact of being big.
Species-counting went the same way around the third block, and he just let the size of the place sit there, unsorted, which felt marginally less impossible than trying to categorize it all.
Somewhere around the fourth or fifth block, a pattern he hadn't clocked before finally sank in.
Wait a second. Everyone I've seen since we landed reads as female. Every single one.
He almost said it out loud to Maci, actually got as far as opening his mouth, then thought better of it. He had no idea what gender even meant to a species with scales or horns or a tail, human categories weren't built for any of this, and pointing it out to a total stranger felt less like an observation and more like a great way to sound like an idiot.
Cultural difference, probably. Not my business either way.
He filed it away and kept walking.
"Hey, pick it up a little."
Maci tugged his sleeve without breaking stride, and his feet stumbled back into a fast walk before his brain caught up with why.
"Hurry up for what."
Maci wove them both around what looked like a fruit cart on legs, not stopping to explain further.
"We're meeting my boss. She already called it in, wants you brought straight to her."
Boss. Somebody has a boss on a station with twenty-two million people on it, and apparently that somebody wants to meet me specifically.
The word landed heavier than it should have.
Whoever ran the day-to-day on a ring this size, enough to have Maci jumping the second a call came in, wasn't some middle-manager type.
That was the person actually holding this whole place together.
"What's she like? Your boss."
Maci didn't slow down to elaborate, tail flicking once.
"Oh, you'll love her~ She's very thorough, very calm, never raises her voice, not once, not even when she probably should."
That is not comforting information. That is the opposite of comforting information.
"Calm's good, right? Calm's not scary."
"Sure. Calm's great, right up until it isn't."
Maci's pace picked up another notch, like the conversation was over.
He decided not to ask anything else.
The crowd thinned out the closer they got to the spire, storefronts giving way to a wide, quiet plaza that read like Bureau grounds, fewer people, more purpose in every stride. The spire itself rose overhead like a needle balanced on its point, and at its base sat a door that made Hikaru stop walking entirely.
It had to be four meters tall, easy, set into a frame carved with patterns he didn't have names for, dwarfing both of them standing in front of it.
That's not a door. That's a garage for giants.
He tilted his head back to actually take in the top of it.
"Is this normal. Do doors here just come in extra large, or does your boss specifically need one this big."
Maci crossed her arms, eyes sliding anywhere but the door itself.
"It's architectural, standard for Director-level offices, makes a statement."
"The statement being what, exactly. 'I could crush you and also several of your friends'?"
Maci shrugged, tail gone still against her leg.
"I mean. Kind of, yeah."
Great. Cool. I love that for me.
She didn't move to open it. Neither did he.
They just stood there, the door taking up most of his field of view, and for a second neither of them said anything at all.
Looking for feedback, so feel free to write a review or comment.