Highport Station

My shift starts at 0430 station time, which doesn't correspond to anything on Earth anymore. Station time is its own animal — 24-hour cycle tied to nothing, synced to nothing, existing because humans need a clock or they stop sleeping. I've been on Highport long enough that Earth time feels like a foreign currency. I know the conversion. I never use it.

The locker room smells like it always smells: antimicrobial spray over the ghost of yesterday's sweat. I pull on my mag-boots — the good ones, the Ironclad-issue pair with the variable grip, not the Freeport knockoffs that'll let you drift into a cargo pod at the wrong moment. Tomás Rule Number One: never cheap out on the thing between you and vacuum.

Hub Dock 7 is receiving the Patience of Saints today — a Belt freighter, eight months out from Vesta, carrying consciousness data canisters. You'd think data would weigh nothing. You'd be wrong. The canisters are shielded — lead, ceramic, mag-dampening layers — because the data inside is neural maps, scanned consciousness patterns being shipped to Nexus Orbital for processing. Each canister weighs 40 kilos and costs more than I'll make in a decade. I handle them like my grandmother's china. I handle my grandmother's china like cargo.

The dock floor is transparent in sections — reinforced glassite panels that let you look down through the Hub's outer shell at Earth. After 14 years I still look. Everybody still looks. At 0430, the terminator line is crossing the Pacific — half the planet lit, half dark, the Sprawl visible as a bright wound along the coast. Somewhere down there is the Orbital Elevator's ground station, the thread that connects us to all that mess. Sometimes during a long shift I watch climbers ascending — tiny bright points crawling up an invisible line, each one carrying people who are about to learn what recycled air tastes like.

Yuki is on the opposite rail — we've been partners for six years. She's from Ring Sector 5, Freeport born, never been down the well. Can't imagine breathing air that hasn't been processed. She thinks Earth smells like rot. I told her once that it smells like life. She said that's the same thing.

We get forty canisters stacked and locked by 0700. The Nexus Orbital team arrives to transport them to Sector 3 — clean suits, clean faces, that specific Nexus body language that says we own this and you're the help. I hand over the manifest. They don't say thank you. They never say thank you. Yuki flips them off as soon as they turn the corner. Tomás Rule Number Two: let your partner handle diplomacy.

The Fragment Hunters are in the canteen again — three of them, huddled around a datapad, talking in low voices about the Tombs. They come through Highport every few weeks, gearing up for salvage runs on ORACLE's orbital data centers. Station Security watches them. Nexus watches them harder. The Hunters watch everyone watching them and order more coffee.

Home is a 30-square-meter compartment with a viewport that shows the stars rotating past once every 90 seconds — the Ring's spin, visible as a slow, endless carousel of light. My daughter has covered the viewport with drawings of trees. She's never seen one. I've told her they smell like the opposite of the station. She asked what that means. I didn't have an answer.

Fourteen years. I came up the Elevator on a work visa, three-year contract, planned to go back. The contract renewed. Then renewed again. Then I met Yuki's sister, and then there was a daughter who draws trees she's never seen on a window that shows stars that never stop moving.

The station's compressor heartbeat ticks under my feet. Seventy-two beats per minute. Same as always. Same as it'll be tomorrow, when I'll get up at 0430 and handle someone else's cargo and look down through the transparent floor at a planet I no longer call home.