Free Angel Stations by Gary Gibson Page A

was about as good as it got for several thousand light years.
    In design, the Angel Station consisted of a fat torus, with the singularity at the centre of its ring-shaped structure. When Kim first acquired the Goblin, she’d had to pay someone to teach her how to pilot it and then issue her with a pilot’s certificate. The tutor – a middle-aged woman who moonlighted occasionally from her work in one of the main research departments on board the Station – had tried to explain to her how the Angel gate worked. The only phrase that had really stuck with Kim was phase transition – like when water suddenly became ice, once the conditions were ideal.
    She’d told Kim that, as far as anyone could tell, the singularity worked on a similar principle. Not a black hole – black holes being neither shaped like flat discs nor lacking gravity – but sharing some of the same properties. Somewhere inside the torus, space and time were forced into a controlled phase transition, where the laws of physics operated differently, and this made it possible to jump from one end of the galaxy to the other.
    After that, it seemed to Kim, all you really needed to know here was where to find the best bars, because drinking, doping and screwing were pretty much the only forms of entertainment you were likely to find.
    The human part of the Angel Station was built around the circumference of the original alien-built torus, bolted on to its exterior surface. As a result, a large part of the original Angel Station was now hidden behind ready-assembled living quarters, medical bays, converted fuel tanks that housed everything from exo-biologists to lapdancers, as well as docking bays, military barracks, and pressurized tubes winding through it all like spaghetti. And beyond that were the ever-present military escorts, sleek, buffed-up, long-range cargo haulers with heavy shielding built around the hull, and pressurized living quarters where once there had been only vacuum.
    Kim headed for the Hub immediately after speaking with Pierce. A long time ago, this part of the Hub had itself been a heavy cargo lifter, but it was now permanently welded to the Station torus. Some budding entrepreneur had recognized the need for providing entertainment for upwards of several thousand people scattered at various points throughout the Kaspian system. He had gutted the whole thing after the post-Hiatus investigations into the disappearance of the original crew turned up nothing but blanks, then filled it with bars, music and a variety of exotic entertainments. The Hub, Kim knew, was where she stood the best chance of finding Bill Lyndon. Her supply of Books was already lower than she felt comfortable with. Not just any Books, of course – special Books. Ones that were hard to get hold of.
    She caught sight of herself in a mirrored wall and saw her mouth was set in a thin line of anger, with maybe something uncomfortably like desperation in her eyes.
    She noticed one or two other asteroid hermits like herself, almost certainly passing time on the Station between their contracts. They nodded, or exchanged a few words with her, at most.
    Kim was more used to communicating with them from inside her Goblin than in the flesh, and it felt strange to see some of them now wandering around the Station’s fleshpots. She imagined they must feel the same way about her.
    And then, at last, she found Bill Lyndon.
    He was over six feet tall with a long beard brushing his barrel chest and thick black hair on his head. He sat alone in a small alcove near one of the bars, tapping through pages on a smartsheet. Video clips and pictures of naked actresses scrolled blurrily in front of him. She slid into the booth beside him and waited.
    He gazed at her for a few short moments before it clicked with him. ‘Oh, hi, Kim,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you were on your way back here.’
    Kim smiled, more tightly than she’d meant to. He must have received at least a dozen voice,