11
Salima
April had been in and out of airlocks all her life. She had on occasion done this in a spacesuit, the hull of the ship or station under her gloved hands, but more often she had moved from ship to ship or ship to station from two joined airlocks, the exterior shape of the vessel just an abstraction extrapolated by her mind. She had never really thought about how seldom she had seen the outside of a ship until Hakim brought her to the Triomphe’s dry dock and she saw shuttles and vessels of all sorts cluttering up a space as large as the marketplace below. She had never imagined such a variety of craft were traveling about in the solar system.
Hakim glanced at the screen of his oversized reader, then led the way along a serpentine craft between the shuttles in various stages of r
