I stood gawking like a tourist at the inverted skyscrapers that hung down from the sky of stone and ice and iron. But I wasn’t a tourist. This was my home now.
The hollowed out asteroid was thick with the stench of people who all showered in the same few gallons of precious recycled water. By and large the people here had too little of everything: too little clean air; too little space, and too little energy; too little imagination to run their too little schemes. Too little muscle, and too little power. I was going to make a killing here.
But one killing would come before the rest.
Normally, Denny Sharpe would be a tough man to find. He wouldn’t exactly have a storefront. But transportation was a limited resource here, and on a ball of rock small enough that it couldn’t even pull itself into a sphere, the hiding places would be finite. Plus, he didn’t even know I was here yet.
I needed to get a feel for the environment, so I followed the neon haze into a lurid open-air market. Half of what they were selling was tough to find on Coalition worlds because the prison sentences for possession were so harsh; you had to know someone who knew someone to get this shit. But here, they displayed it on well-beaten rugs like overpriced handcrafted garbage for sale at a cruise liner port. I stole an N7 Suncutter sidearm and two hits of cycle on my first pass.
Notes: I used several images as a writing prompt for this piece. I found them on pages 96-97 of my copy of The Art of the Mass Effect Universe.
Warmup Pages 