Friend chirped in acknowledgement from the speakers, and the chorus beetles ceased.

Roveg liked beetles just fine, but today, he wanted something else, something … ‘Play Relaxation Mix #6,’ he said. ‘On random.’

Friend chirped again, and the music began to play.

‘That’s better,’ Roveg said. He continued to eat, humming softly as he chewed. ‘How long until descent?’

‘Twenty minutes,’ Friend replied.

Roveg flexed his abdominal plates in mild surprise. ‘Is that all? Well.’ He looked down at the last of the morning delicacies. ‘Damn.’ He thought briefly about bolting the remainder of his meal, but eating food without savouring it was almost as bad as throwing it out. He gathered the remnants with care, drank the seagrass juice with an appreciative shudder, and got to his feet. ‘Friend, please continue music playback throughout the main sound system.’ He gestured at a panel and the beach disappeared, leaving only projection hardware and smooth walls in its stead. He passed through the doors and into the hallways of his ship.

The Korrigoch Hrut had been Roveg’s shuttle for standards, and he loved it well. It wasn’t his home – that, he had left back on Chalice, a charming dwelling built into a cliff overlooking the city centre. But space travel suited him best when embarked upon in a ship that felt like home, and he had decorated the interior of the Korrigoch Hrut accordingly. There was not a wall outside of the engine core that didn’t have art hanging from it. There were abstract Aandrisk paintings, Aeluon colour-opera masks, exquisite baubles made of Harmagian glass, some gifts, some memories, some passing fancies stumbled upon during a marketplace stroll. He patted a Human-made landscape painting with a leg as he walked into the kitchen. He was particularly fond of that piece.

He packed away his leftovers with meticulous care, placing them on the stasie shelves just so, then headed for the control room, still humming along to the music that followed.

The planet Gora dominated the viewscreen; he’d not abandoned his breakfast a moment too soon. He’d never travelled by way of Gora before, and his first impression was of a very orderly mess. The other transit hubs he’d been through were all situated around living planetary systems, where life happened down on the ground and traffic stuck to the orbiters above. But here, where the planet served no other purpose than to cater to the temporary needs of those in passing, where every dome was individually owned and the only shared territory were the traffic lanes guiding ships to and fro, everything smacked of utilitarian artificiality. There were no seas, no forests, no great cities. This was a place to be used, not lived in.

Roveg’s compound eyes were capable of tracking many objects in motion at once, but even he struggled to parse the scene before him. The open space he flew through was thick with ships of all sorts: sleek cruisers with polished white hulls, colourful teardrops made for going fast and looking good doing it, hefty haulers fat with cargo, luxurious vacation skiffs, cheap-ride deepods, and shuttles that appeared held together with nothing more than a welding torch and hope. The vessels moved as though they were following a pheromone trail, each marching along, one after the next, docking here and turning there, waiting patiently in the wormhole queue for their turn to hop through the space between space. Heavy as the traffic was, Roveg took comfort in the tidy streams of ships and the calculated rows of buoys. Roveg liked space travel just fine, and he rather relished any opportunity to take his shuttle out for a few tendays, but he didn’t do it particularly often. Space was not his life. He wasn’t the sort to enjoy an unplotted jaunt through the off-road sections of the galactic map, and he certainly didn’t like landing in places where travel law was approached as more of a suggestion than a rule – especially not given the course he was on now. The task at hand was fraught enough without adding traffic violations to the mix.

As Roveg waited for Friend to guide the Korrigoch Hrut into a proper entry angle, he noticed a second dance of machinery occurring in the space below the ship traffic – or, at least, inasmuch as ‘below’ had any sort of meaning in three-dimensional space. The orbital layer cocooning Gora was as thick with satellites as any world he’d ever seen. He noted comms tech, and solar harvesters as well. The latter’s distinctive shape was unmistakable – huge photosynthetic panels blooming among the weeds of the comms dishes. Their panels glittered as they soaked up raw sunlight undiluted by atmosphere, and he took care not to look too long at the concentrated beams making their way down to collection stations on the surface. Solar was the only sort of power that made sense on a windless, waterless world, and he was glad that this portion of infrastructure seemed to be communally distributed. He didn’t much fancy the idea of each dome being a bubble unto itself, powered by whatever generator the owner could manage. Roveg was nothing if not a champion of playing one’s own tune, but there were some areas in which individuality stopped being a virtue and became more of a game of chance.

‘We’re ready for entry, Roveg,’ Friend said. The AI was neither sapient nor sentient, as Roveg detested the use of their soulful kind. Even so, he had made a point to tweak Friend’s linguistic files into something companionable – in Klip, of course, never Tellerain. Roveg was sparing about the contexts in which he welcomed his mother tongue.

‘Thank you, Friend,’ Roveg said, even though the AI had no capability with which to care about being thanked. ‘Let’s begin.’