When Siegena was close enough to see, Amber unexpectedly found herself impressed. She’d been shuttling folks around the belt with her pops for as long as she’d been able to float, so she considered herself worldly; she thought she’d been just about everywhere, and one place mostly looked like any other. But Siegena was different.
It was the scale of it—the proportions were all wrong. Most settlements in the belt were anchored to asteroids one or two kilometers around—that was more than enough material to satiate a sizable population. But Siegena was over 150 kilometers around its shortest side; it was a giant! The spindly scaffolding of the habitat looked like a fragile toy on first approach. There weren’t just a million people here—there were millions.
Amber was so fixated on the monitor that she didn’t register her pops calling to her over the comms. He floated up and waved a hand in front of her face, startling her into kicking off the wall and sailing halfway across the living deck.
“Girl, did you leave your ears back at port? I’ve been calling you.”
She rubbed the back of her neck where the little hairs bristled. “Sorry, Pops, but look at it!” She pointed at the monitor. “It’s enormous!”
He squinted his tired old eyes. “Well sure. That’s why people want to go there. People like our passengers, for example. We’re not running a guided tour here. We’ve gotta dock to get paid.”
Amber rolled her eyes and swatted at her hair—tie must have fallen out. She rolled about in the air looking for it. “Alright, alright. What do you need me to do?”
“Dock it. Today, ideally.”
She stopped looking for the hair tie and oriented herself so she could face him, albeit upside down. “Really? You mean it? You’ll let me fly her in?”
Her father grinned. “You’d be flyin’ her already if you’d been paying attention. C’mon, Kid, let’s get cruisin’!”
Warmup Pages 