Incursion Vector

010

[▲] Auckland, New Zealand, Earth

Nim had never seen an open-air market before. Once was definitely going to be enough for her.

Despite the fact that the cloud-darkened sky looked like it was going to open up in pouring rain at any moment there was a vast web of mismatched stalls spread out over a two kilometer area, every one of them was hocking things from shoes to produce to seaweed and its accompanying fauna. People just wandered absolutely everywhere and there was no one directing the flow of traffic at all. It was complete and utter chaos, and yet it seemed to work really well for everyone there. Goods were moving in and out quickly, and from the maglev station they looked kind of like ants running about a really convoluted maze of colorful tents. There was even a place at the furthest end were live animals could be bought, slaughtered, and butchered on-site. A half dozen vehicles were lined up there with their trunks open waiting for their order to be packed in so they could drive back to the hilariously mismatched modern city of sleek and reflective towers just a half kilometer away.

Since she had absolutely no desire to watch someone slit the throat of cute farm animals she stayed well away from that area of the market. Lyall always mocked her for that one. She was trained to efficiently dispatch people as a marine, many times in close quarters by slitting human throats, and never had any real issues with performing the act on simulacra during full-immersion sims—but cute furry things incapable of shooting back? It upset her like nothing else. Lyall had teased her about it since the day she learned from Aries that their little sister had called him in hysterics after watching a historical video of pre-spaceflight slaughterhouses on Terra Core.

After an hour of wandering she found a woman in a cozy stall that smelled like garlic of all things. She felt a twinge of sadness approaching the place; garlic would always remind her of Shelke. After the EMP blast from the alien ship had knocked out all electronics in their battle sphere Shelke had taken a dead-on hit to the cockpit of her marauder from one of the roaming enemy fighters. The flight surgeon said she hadn't felt a thing but Nim knew otherwise. She had been dead in the water wondering if she was going to die too. What they both had been feeling was pure, unfiltered terror. The only defense Stukas really had was their speed and agility; take either one away and they were target buoys. A dead stick was every Stuka pilot's worst nightmare, one that they created more ways to avoid quicker than a safety engineer could come up with new failsafes that they would inevitably bypass.

The older woman in the colorful head scarf sold both dates and neatly wrapped packages of dolma. The discovery caused Nim to do a small dance of victory that garnered her suspicious stares from everyone in the vicinity. Once she told the owner what she was buying them for she promptly saddled Nim with an entire bag of both "hot" and "cold" dolma and a box full of dates, charging her only what it cost for the ingredients and extolling her virtues as a kind friend. The act stunned her into silence; she had always heard that in civilian markets one had to engage in ritualized haggling in order to negotiate an acceptable price. When she mentioned the reason for her shock the woman just grinned at her and went about her day with a sigh of, "Ah, spacers."

Dates and dolma in-hand she picked her way through the masses of people to where she had agreed to meet Keiji. They had decided to divide and conquer the market so they could spend as little time as possible out in the sun, anathema to pale-skinned spacers like them. Keiji was burned red on one side though he claimed his hangover was fine after downing whatever fizzy concoction the Lewis family had brewed up for him. She was just permanently land sick and wanted to go into hibernation within a sensory deprivation chamber until their leave was over. The bruises on her back didn't hurt half as much as she had expected, but floating around in complete silence without constantly breathing in nature dust was alluring.