[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult Read Online Free Page B

title page in his own blood.
    She wondered whether that bonehead Alicia still had a mouth that looked like a paper-cut.
    She should stop dwelling on it. She should stop thinking about unsolved murders and think about tax evasion and export licences instead. Be constructive with her time. Concentrate on her job. Maybe, if she concentrated hard enough, something interesting might turn up. She rubbed the label on her empty pot of noodles.
    ‘What’s the largest amount of synthi-noodle consumed by a human being in a single afternoon?’ she asked the interactive packaging.
    ‘Fifty pots!’ replied Chet Noodles, the relentlessly chirpy, anthropomorphic embodiment of the SynNoodle brand, dancing across the label. ‘Set by Nils-Olof Franzen, deceased, on Lansbury Five. Synthetic noodle RDA is zero pots.’
    She flopped out an arm and waved for a baristabot.
    ‘Hit me,’ said Phoebe. She was going for the record.

Chapter Three
    Anyone landing on Gippsworld who wasn’t drunk or lost or trying to sell encyclopaedias would have caused a stir, but the stranger who turned up at the spaceport that morning left an actual audible thrum of excitement in his wake. The ship he climbed out from was sleek and expensive-looking and had jazzy blue zigzags down the side. The man himself was even more sleek and expensive-looking. He wore a glittering, phosphorescent cravat and an old-fashioned, white Zirconium suit. It looked handmade rather than printed. Misha had never seen a handmade suit before. He’d also never seen such a daringly pointless little beard, or such a thrillingly asymmetrical haircut. He’d been hosing down the pig transport when the stranger doffed his hat at him. Not having a hat to doff himself, he waggled his hose awkwardly in reply, because he didn’t know what else to do.
    When the stranger stopped off at the spaceport’s greasy bar and grill, Rita Korolev, who always had a tendency to start drinking early, reported breathlessly that he’d ordered a type of coffee none of the baristabots had ever heard of. And as he then proceeded to wander the streets, past the now-mostly-crumbling local architecture, the wave of gossip swelled. He kept stopping and taking pictures of things that didn’t look as if they needed to have their pictures taken: broken masonry, abandoned plasma silos, dead birds. When the locals, pretending they just happened to be out for a stroll or had dropped something in his vicinity, sidled up as close as they dared, they’d noticed him muttering into his sleeve. Someone reported hearing the phrase ‘unique cultural mindset’. Somebody else was sure he’d also said ‘rich tapestry’. It was confusing. Usually when an off-worlder accidentally landed on Gippsworld they stuck to phrases like ‘
Jesus Christ
’ and ‘
I swear to god, Gavin, if you don’t fix that navigation unit I’m taking the kids and moving back to Phobos
’.
    Occasionally, the man would stop and ask people something about their lives, but then, instead of rolling his eyes and yawning at the inevitable boring pig- or methane-based anecdote – like a normal person would – he’d say, “
Fascinating!
” and compliment them on their unspoilt, earthy charm.
    One of the methane farm girls said that she’d heard he was an anthropologist. Another said that they’d heard a rumour he was something big in marketing. Rita claimed she had it on good authority that he was a high-powered mineral trader. From one of the core worlds. Maybe the
empire,
even. Certainly somewhere very cosmopolitan,
you can just tell from his bearing
, she added, knowledgeably.
    The thing that really got everyone worked up was what happened when the stranger bumped into Mad Vladimir, the city’s resident hobo. Mad Vladimir, as usual, was seated outside the never-completed fifth-deepest mine in the galaxy, next to a trestle table piled high with his weird, shapeless sculptures. These were things he made out of Gippsworld’s thick, grey,