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Wealthy merchants with gem-encrusted rings bump elbows with desalination workers in the line for coffee. Scarred soldiers swap stories with wiry metallurgists and tanned greenhouse farmers as they pick fish bones out of their teeth. And a debt-slave like you can walk without people staring too long at your brands for a single cup of tea.
Food. The almighty equalizer.
Fish skewers straight out of the bay, a fried meat cutlet on a bed of salt-water rice, and two cool mugs of barely tea. The last good meal before your next schlep out to sea. One of your few silver ducats well-spent, with change to spare.
There’s still nearly an hour left before your meeting, but you have nothing else to do. At least, nothing to do that isn’t otherwise sentimental. Little as it is, and bereft you are of any sort of work-related business.
Paying a visit to your old flat would be an excuse in futility. That was the second thing you cut ties with after the incursion of your debt. An unnecessary expenditure that you didn’t need since you were given berthing at the Duck, and everything you owned could be fit into your sea-chest. Last you heard, the entire block had been bought, and renovated into a boarding house for merchants and sailors.
Thank God that you don't have to find somewhere to stay overnight. That would've been an awfully wasteful expense.
But beyond that…
<span class="mu-i">“Tommy misses his uncle, Sinleq…would it hurt for you to visit just once?”</span>
…no.
No, there’s nothing left for you to do here.
>>Berth No. 07, Saltside Corner Public Docks…
“What the heck?”
An armed salvage trawler isn’t exactly the image that comes to mind when you think of a ship named after a goddess. And there had been plenty of them in the Old World. Cruise liners, spaceships, developing colonies…actual women, for one thing. You just <span class="mu-i">know</span> that in the cultural hodge-podge that is Babylonia, there’s at least one person whose parents fell just as hard for the Greco-Roman/Mesopotamian LARP as yours.
If there’s any mercy in the world, you’ll be giving your future progeny proper, modern names. As far as you know, the only “Sinleq” is the bloody poet who penned the Epic of Gilgamesh four thousand years ago.
But that’s beside the point. You can honestly say that in your career as engineer, mechanic and PUEXO pilot, you’ve never seen a ship like the one docked at Berth No. 7.
From what little knowledge you have of ships, the <span class="mu-i">Calypso</span> looks like the engineering lovechild of a salvage ship and a destroyer. And then some mad scientist decided to graft the bastardized superstructure of a research vessel and a cargo hauler on top of it. There’s nothing even remotely conforming to pre-Calamity, 25th century ship design. As far as you can tell, this ship floated right out of a museum. Or more likely, the fever dream of a kitbash model enthusiast!
(cont.)
