Eclipse Phase by Jaym Gates

Author:Jaym Gates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Posthuman Studios
Published: 2016-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

Prix Fixe

Andrew Penn Romine

It’s a forty-day burn across the belt from Extropia to 1123 Hungaria, and Jule Cortez is ravenous. Her stomach growling, she sits up from the acceleration couch to get a better view of the misshapen asteroid spinning slowly outside the cockpit window. Just nine kilometers, end to end. She’s burned a lot of fuel and a lot of favors to get here, and the asteroid looks almost good enough to eat.

“Finally. I’m starving,” she whispers.

[Your blood sugar levels are normal], her muse, Thoth, assures in an androgynous purr.

“You’d be hungry, too, knowing Chef is down there.”

She means metacelebrity Chef Volkan Batuk, missing and presumed dead, but Jule’s found him at last, hiding on a speck of dust in the endless black.

[I can’t get hungry], Thoth reminds her. Her muse has been snarkier than usual since its last firmware update.

Small clusters of buildings cling to the crust of the asteroid. They’re leftovers from an old mining venture, abandoned when the mineral deposits proved shallow. Perfect place to hide, though, Jule thinks.

1123 Hungaria’s a Cole bubble, spun just fast enough to provide weak gs to the cavern hollowed out along the axis. The ship’s sensors ping power signatures. Another shrill alarm warns of targeting lasers locking on.

“What if he doesn’t want to be bothered?” she worries, punching transmit on the passcode she’d retrieved off the mesh. It took months to decipher the clues, and a generous deposit of funds to ghost accounts. She hopes it’s not a hoax.

[Why invite us all the way out here, then?]

The comm chimes.

“Spacecraft Peppercorn. Follow instructions for landing. Do not deviate.”

“That sure sounds like Batuk,” she admits to Thoth as she fires the vernier jets, matching Peppercorn’s orbit with 1123 Hungaria’s spin. An open hangar swings into view, beacons winking emerald.

[Voiceprint’s a probable match], Thoth confirms. [We found him, alright.]

“Yeah.” Jule can’t help but grin even though her feelings are an emulsion of amazement and apprehension. She might never have come all the way out here from Mars without her muse’s guidance. Thoth’s level-headed encouragement had been a foil to her anxiety over all the conspiracy theories surrounding the metacelebrity’s supposed death.

Batuk’s restaurant, Trimalchio, once orbited the limb of Mars in an absurdly expensive hab for the hyperelite. It took money, power, and kilometers of rep just to get in the reservation queue, and after that, a year-long wait. Batuk’s recipes were copied widely. Anyone with a half-way decent fabber could churn out his famous enoki-stuffed polenta shells or wet-print his divine poitrine de porc souffles with jus rouge.

Growing up, Jule had fabbed whole feasts from his recipes, using her EZPrint from Prosperity Group, Batuk’s chief sponsor. She had all the XPs, too. For her fifteenth birthday, though, all Jule Cortez wanted was to eat at Trimalchio, and because her parents were well-placed execs at Prosperity Group she got her spot on the wait-list.

But, a week before her meal, an explosion in Trimalchio’s kitchen depressured the hab and scattered its elite diners into the vacuum of space.

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