SCS Fanfiction Contest Winner - Above the Clouds - By Luke W. Logan

SCS Fanfiction Contest Winner - Above the Clouds - By Luke W. Logan

Above the Clouds - By Luke W. Logan

The Empyrean Hotel, Casino & Spa sits in a geostationary orbit 35,787 kilometres above the Earth's equator. A seamless blend of Vanguard technologies and human ingenuity, the Empyrean's facilities boast unmatched levels of luxury without ever compromising on security. With literally thousands of kilometres of deadly vacuum between you and any unwanted guests, when you stay at the Empyrean you can truly relax; safe from incursions, ex-(and current)wives, paparazzi, and tax authorities! Single suite rooms start at $5000 per night. The Empyrean Hotel, Casino & Spa's promotional pamphlet.

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Gomorrah stalked the streets of River Heights burning mansions and estates with an irreverent glee that could be seen through the reflective faceplate of her armoured helm. The camera angle cut from directly above to offer close-upand frequently provocativeshots of her lithe form as the Samurai made her way through an upscale neighbourhood that had been considerably less on fire only a few moments before.

The AI rendering the various camera angles tended to get a little carried away, and some perspectives were considerably more gratuitous than others. In many ways, it was like watching an anime with a serious fan-service problem, in others, it was just a total violation of Gomorrah's personal privacy. Deepfaking a Samurai was an especially dangerous and illicit endeavour. But here on the Empyrean's casino floor, using spy satellites and AI to spice up real-time arson was amongst the least of Management's many sins.

A rolling bar of text scrolled along the bottom of the screen calculating the approximate property damage so-far and offering decreasingly favourable odds for those who could correctly guess the final value of Gomorrah's napalm-spraying spree. A cluster of middle-aged guests watched the footage with rapt attention, collectively wincing when the feed cut away to differentless popularSamurai engaged in more mundane forms of frantic violence. The camera always switched back after a few minutes of flashy ultra-violence. Newer Samurai were far safer to spy on, and the pyro-nun was insanely hotpun intended.

I tore my gaze away from the screens showcasing Gomorrah's beautifully lit arse just in time to avoid braining myself on an open car door. The culprit of my near-miss was the slowly rotating vehicle taking up a considerable amount of space within the casino floor. My free arm windmilled ungraciously while the drinks balanced in my other tilted precariously. The instincts I'd honed through five gruelling years in the service industry saved both them, and a few days' worth of docked wages, as I righted my tray, and kept the overpriced liquors in their respective glasses. I also avoided falling into the first sports car launched into space, but that would have just been humiliating rather than financially eviscerating.

I glared at the bright red vehicle and promised myself vengeance should I ever discover a time machine. Somewhere in the not-too-distant-past, Space Karen was enjoying themselves having sent the electric vehicle into orbit and I couldn't let that stand. I understood it was just the refurbished leftovers of a fifty-year-old publicity stunt, but now that it nearly killed me on a daily basis, I thoroughly despised it and its arguably beneficial legacy.

Fucking, Space Karen.

The few tonnes of antique steel and fibreglass that made up the refurbished vehiclenot to mention its constantly rotating podiumhad been placed right in the middle of my preferred path from the bar to the screen lounge. Whichever genius from Management had decided to put the 'Car to be won!' on the Casino floor, had yet to update the haptics in our trays. So when I daydreamed and let the gentle nudges guide me towards whoever was waiting on their drink, I frequently found myself walking directly into the bright red convertible.

Despite my grumbles, I made it to my section without further incident. I then spent five minutes unloading my tray to a collection of wealthy gamblers with more money than taste. The haptics in my tray told me where to go, and the cameras in the ceiling made sure my pay would be docked for any mistakes I might make. This early in the day it was better to be seen and not heard. The guests primarily ordered through their augs, and then I would appear a few minutes later to hand over their beverages without a word. They very rarely tipped, but considering nobody tried to flirt with me, I didn't feel like complaining.

When my tray was empty, I took one last look at Gomorrah on the screens above before making my way back towards the bar. This time I pointedly avoided my inanimate nemesis and walked a little closer to the felt-lined tables where more respectable gamblers exchanged large fortunes over the turn of a card. A small part of me was jealous of the guest's obscene wealth. The average bet made in this casino was more than twice my annual salary, but having worked at the Empyrean for so long, I had largely grown numb to the allure of wealth. Instead, I had become deeply afraid that the attitudes of the idle rich I catered to were representative of the majority, not the minority of those with true money.

I had seen enough decadence and lack of basic human empathy from the politicians and CEOs who ran my world to last a lifetime. Management were bad, but the things I'd seen guests do while working a night shift made those sociopathic monsters seem like saints.

Seriously, if you want to continue sleeping soundly in blissful ignorance, never work nights in a five-star hotel. The tips simply aren't worth the existential dread.

When I reached the bar, I set my tray down gently and sighed.

"You okay, Gwen?"

I looked up and saw Sybille smiling at me from behind the counter. She was the closest thing I had to a friend in the Empyrean, which was a big deal for me. Shuttles down to Earth were maddeningly expensive, and staff were effectively stuck in the hotel for six-month tours at a time. No matter how spacious the crew facilities wereand ours were not spaciousspending six months in an enclosed space with someone either made you friends for life or the direst of enemies.

Given my personality, I had cultivated a lot of enemies during my time at the Empyrean.

Sybille was one of the few who'd been working here longer than me, and she was the only person who not only tolerated my quirks but actually seemed to like them. She called me 'neurospicy' and while it made me feel more like an overseasoned taco than a person, it made me feel like her overseasoned taco. I could quite happily live with that.

"I'm fine," I lied, not really meaning it but daring her to question me. "Do you have drinks for me?"

"Yeah, you've got some big drinkers today. There's a lot of old whiskeys to go back to the screens," Sybille said, placing the first of many tumblers on my no-longer vacant tray. The drinks kept piling up far in excess of what I was used to, and my eyebrows quirked upwards.

"That's a lot of booze."

"Ten points to captain obvious."

I blushed.

"You know what I mean," I said defensively.

"I do, but you're fun to tease," Sybille replied with her usual smile. "Have you been paying attention to what's actually going on in your section, or have you been sneaking glances at Gomorrah's ass all morning?"

"I"

"Yeah that's what I thought." She chuckled, but there was no joy in it, and I couldn't help but frown. "The world's burning, Gwen. More so than usual. The high-ranking Samurai are MIA and all over the planet anathema are hunting people for food. These guys" Sybille gestured towards where the guests I was tasked to serve watched the Samurai fight aliens live on TV "are all politicians, shareholders, or captains of various industries. They'll know better than most how bad it really is, and if you look, you'll see that they're all drinking. Heavily. Rumour has it there's been talk amongst Management about dropping the hotel's no-minors policy and start selling permanent suites to families"

I scoffed.

"And give up all the money they make from the joygirl floor? Please. It will never happen," I answered.

"I dunno, Gwen Rich people generally like their kids being alive more than they enjoy a quick tumble in the sheets with a well-compensated stranger. Besides, they can have families in the suites and keep the joygirl floor. It's a big hotel," Sibylle said, and she wasn't wrong about that last part.

"Still, I can't imagine this place with little brats running about."

"Me neither, but times are changing."

"You make it sound like it's the end of days," I said.

Sybille shrugged.

"Maybe it is." There was a pregnant pause while my friend continued to pour expensive liquor we could never afford into crystal glassware we would never own. I looked back over at my section and tried to imagine the millionaires and billionaires who made up the Empyrean's clientele indulging in their illicit vices while their families slept only a few hundred metres away, rather than thirty-five thousand kilometres they did now.

I couldn't see it.

But then again, I couldn't see a lot of things.

I looked at their faces, searching for some of the fear Sibylle suggested was there. They looked drunk, but that was about all I could divine. Maybe if I was normal rather than neurospicy I'd be able to understand facial expressions like Sybille could, but I struggled to maintain eye contact at the best of times and I had the social instincts of a turnip. If it wasn't for my augs, I wouldn't even be able to function in a place as loud and bright as the casino. But I had them, so it wasn't a big deal.

People though they were still hard for me to work with.

"Your drinks are ready," Sybille said. She was smiling at me again, but I didn't know why she'd gone from being needlessly dramatic to overly friendly. I smiled back and made sure to look into her eyes for three full seconds, because that was usually the right thing to do.

"Thanks," I eventually replied.

I picked up my tray, now filled to the brim with heavy glassware and followed the haptics back to my section. Again they nearly guided me into that damned sportscar, and again I avoided an expensive spill by the skin of my teeth. I wove between the crowds while Gomorrah on the screens above wove between a swarm of flaming anathema. They barrelled towards her threatening death, whereas most of my customers only wanted their drinks. The few who wanted more, I evaded, displaying what I like to think of as a similar level of effortless grace to the pyro-nun I was so fond of.Cheêck out latest novels at novelhall.com

My tray was half-full when it happened. The floor lurched beneath my feet and I both felt and heard the tortured groan of metal shuddering through the Empyrean's substructure. The lights went out, only to be replaced a heartbeat later by red emergency lighting and a siren blared its loud accompanying wails.

My augs immediately kicked in, muting the worst of the noise and softening the glare while guests around me cried out in a panic. During the hustle of suddenly moving bodies, I very nearly dropped my tray. Then the main lights came back on and the siren abruptly stopped. Normalcy resumed, ushered in by the disconcerted mutterings of the uber-rich and I wondered what the hell was wrong. This was firmly out of the ordinary. I liked the almost rote routine of the usual day-to-day. I thrived on it even if my job was boring as hell. But I did not like this. My augs were doing their best to keep me calm and functional, but they weren't perfect, and I could feel my own panic rising as the anxious crowd pulled me under.

Then a burst of static emerged from the recessed speakers which had previously been playing ambient mood music, and I like many others, looked up at the ceiling.

"Apologies for the disturbance. Some fast-moving debris came close to the hotel and we had to fire up the manoeuvring thrusters. Someone in engineering didn't quite get the message and flipped the general alarm as a mistake.

"Engineering, respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about"

"Respectfully, Sir, we do. Now please, open the bulkheads so we can make our way to the escape pods. The station is done, we both know that."

"...Engineering. You are to stay in place and coordinate the remote DC drones. This is just a drill."

"I have sixty people down here, you can't just leave us"

The engineer's voice cut out mid-sentence.

"Sibylle, did we lose our connection?" I asked.

"No, Empyrean Actual cut their comms," she answered.

"Well fuck, what do we do now?"

"You help me into my chair, and then we figure out how to get out of here."

I nodded an action which is considerably easier when you don't have a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman lying on your chest. I slowly squirmed out from under her, making brief and extremely uncomfortable eye contact with the service staff who'd all gathered close around the bar. Phil helped me to my feet, and then together we finagled Sibylle back into her chair.

I pulled up a map of the Empyrean on my augs, and then with a marker, I'd stolen from behind the bar, I started to sketch out a rough floor plan of the hotel.

"We're here," I said, pointing to a rough blocky section I'd drawn that was connected to the central spire of the station. "The majority of the escape pods are located here," I added. This time pointing to the base of that same spire. "We have to go down three decks to cross onto the central spire, and then another twelve to reach the escape pods."

"If there are fires, we can't risk the lifts. That's a lot of stairs," Phil said, nodding towards Sibylle in her wheelchair.

"I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself," she snapped. "Besides, if we stick to the service corridors where the gravity is weaker, I'll be able to pull myself along just fine. I'm more concerned that we'll run into a room without pressure. We don't exactly have any vac-suits lying around."

"Maybe we should stay put and wait for a rescue," Margot said, and everyone did the sensible thing of ignoring her.

"If we need them, we can always double back and get vac-suits from the nearest maintenance locker. There are only twenty of us, so if we hit a few along the way we'll have plenty. What we need is a way to get through the bulkheads. They're designed to withstand an explosive decompression so we can't exactly kick them down," Phil added.

"There's only twenty of us in this room. If Management has locked down the entire hotel, then there are hundreds of staff members just sitting on their hands waiting to die. We can't leave them," I said.

"So what do we do?" Richarda twenty-something craps dealerasked.

There was a long pause while I worked up the nerve to share my idea.

"Two birds, one stone. We talk to engineering. If we can hack a comms system, then there's no way that many nerds can't hack a bulkhead. We explain what's going on, and get them to talk us through opening the doors. They can use their alarms to help us avoid the depressurised areas, and failing that, they're our best chance at patching a minor leak. That's how we save everyone," I said.

"Shit, the weird girl actually has a good idea," someone said, and I didn't know whether to feel flattered or insulted.

"Alright, Phil, Gwen, help me get back under the counter. I need to jack into the bar's computer," Sibylle groaned.

***

It only took Sibylle a few minutes to hack into the hotel's comms for a second time. Routing a call to engineering and then waiting for them to pick up, however, took much longer, and I personally spent those minutes filled with a growing sense of anxiety and dread.

I was one of three people who worked on the casino floor who had both cybernetic eyes and ears. Of the three of us blessed with both sensory augmentations and the Empyrean hotel's monitoring software, I was the only one with some experience splicing wires. Sibylle sagely explained it would be relatively easy to forward a feed of my vision directly to engineering and that it might help speed things along.

I was embarrassed by how easy it was for her to gain access to everything I could both hear and see. It made me want to take a really long shower with my eyes firmly closed when I considered how long I'd been working here. If it wasn't for Sibylle broadcasting the feeds to the screen lounge, I would never have known anyone was intercepting the signal. Then again, the Empyrean made a lot of money off of deepfaking Samurai, and there was a literal floor of the hotel filled with sex workers, so I guess I was a rather boring option for any potential pervs in Management to spy on.

"Okay, Gwen, you're going to want to cut the red and orange wire coming out of the bus junction."

I moved my paring knife to do just that. It was thoroughly unsuitable for the task at hand being designed to slice through lemons and limes with ease rather than plastic-coated cabling. For some reason, its designers had decided against giving it a rubberized grip that would allow me to cut through live wires in relative safety. To make up for its inadequacies, its already too-small-handle was wrapped in insulating paper napkins for my peace of mind if nothing else.

"Not that one! That's the maroon and orange wire. If you cut that you're dead, Gwen!" Nigel blurted out, his voice appearing only in my ears. I froze.

"That's red," I argued.

"It's maroon. If you can't tell the difference, you should hand that fruit knife over to someone who can. We've got a lot riding on this, Gwen."

"I know, I know. You don't have to tell me for the third time," I said, swiftly cutting through the red and orange wire and very nearly dragging my blade through several more. I could hear Nigel's sucked in breath, and then his eventual exhale when I didn't combust in an explosion of electrically-propelled flames. "What next?"

"That's it. You're done. Try the release, and it should open. You've just got to do that on every bulkhead between the casino and engineering without ever making a mistake between red and maroon"

"No pressure, right?" I joked.

"No pressure," Nigel awkwardly echoed after a brief delay.

Obviously, there was a lot of pressure. It turns out engineering was too important to be locked away behind a standard bulkhead, and had its own set of Vanguard-grade blast doors in case of a reactor meltdown. For now, Nigel and his team were safe, but they weren't getting out anytime soon without the Empyrean Actual's help, or well, mine. Failing an override from the bridge, they needed someone on the outside to physically disassemble some of the hydraulics, and wethe casino service staffwere the only parts of the hotel talking to engineering.

Suddenly the twenty souls I had to ferry to the escape pods had ballooned to eighty, and we hadn't even left the room yet.

"Thanks, Nigel. We're coming for you," I said, preparing to mute our call.

"Don't worry about it Gwen, just save all our lives and we'll call it even," he replied. I could tell it was supposed to be a joke, but I didn't smile. Instead, I put myself into a 'busy' subchannel without properly dropping out. I pulled my attention back to my fellow waitstaff and card handlers acutely aware that everything I said and did was likely being analysed by sixty desperate people in the bowels of the hotel's engineering department.

I swallowed my anxiety.

"The bulkhead doors should open now," I announced, and collectively my colleagues let out a long held-in sigh.

We'd prepared as best we could, gathering water, clean cloths, a handful of fruit knives and not much else. Honestly, we had no idea what lay beyond the bulkhead doors besides potentially lethal pressure drops and uncontrolled fires. Living and working aboard what is essentially a glorified space station can be stressful at the best of times, but after nearly an hour of wondering what was on the other side of those reinforced doors, there was little that could be worse than our fevered imaginations.

Sibylle rolled her wheelchair to the door's controls. She nodded once stoically and hit the emergency release button. With a loud hiss of the hydraulics, deadbolts retracted, and then Phil cycled the door. Despite Nigel repeatedly assuring us there was breathable air on the other side, we all breathed a little easier when the relatively fresh air flowed in with the opening of the door.

The bulkhead swung open, revealing a familiar hallway the likes of which could be found throughout the Empyrean hotel complex. Only this one had something more than corporate art and fancy carpets to attract our collective attention.

There, standing in the middle of the doorway on four muscular legs, was a model three.

"Anathema," I whispered.

It cocked its head to the side, and then before we could even begin to close the heavy bulkhead, the alien surged towards us through the open door.

***