Chapter 14

Kat jumped ship at the first port and, despite her nervousness, it was really a non-event. She just simply went ashore during her first off-shift and never came back. She didn't have to worry about raising suspicions by hauling a lot of gear, since she owned very little to begin with. Like many of the crew who planned on spending some time on-planet, she carried a small satchel with her meager belongings inside and simply walked away.

She had a few credits to her name, there hadn't been anything to spend them on aboard the freighter and her monthly pay had been credited to her account as regular as clockwork during the four month journey. It wasn't much, but it would be enough for her to find a flop for a few weeks while she figured out her next step.

Alta fascinated her. This was her first time off her home world and everything seemed so very different and, at the same time, depressingly similar. The spaceport where the shuttle had landed was similar in design to the port where she had boarded the shuttle to leave Ovid. Alta was a younger planet as people of the Union figured things, having been colonized only four hundred years ago, and everything looked so new.

Ovid had been colonized for several centuries before the explorers even found Alta, and her cities reflected that age. The Oolad system had been declining for hundreds of years and everything reflected that status, from the worn and weathered buildings to the overpopulated prole housing areas that covered much of the cities. Alta was newer, cleaner and more spacious, its people not yet feeling the overpopulation that caused governments to build up instead of out.

The people seemed younger too, and more carefree. People actually smiled at her on the street, well, the men anyway. The brightly lit streets, clean of the grime that characterized her home city, seemed foreign to her. There was an ample Peace Keeper presence, and they seemed to be unconcerned about being overwhelmed as they were not even armored!

It was all very strange, and Kat reveled in the newness of it all. She found herself wandering the city center, just playing sightseer for the first time in her life. She bought snacks from a street vendor and sat in a little park, fascinated by the acres of trees and manicured paths. There was even a little park were dozens of children ran and laughed and played.

When evening fell, Kat knew she had to make a decision. She had passed a train station in her wandering, and a quick mental review of her path led her unerringly back to the brightly-lit and crowded place. She found a colorful map on one wall that showed all of the routes that were available to travelers from this station and chose a nearby city at random.

Approaching the information kiosk, she nervously asked about a pass to travel out of the city and was embarrassed when the clerk goggled at her.

"Ma'am? Travel passes? I am not sure I understand. Are you from off-planet or something? I can hear you got an accent and all, but I didn't want to be rude and assume. We don't need no passes here, just pay the price at the ticketing terminals along the wall and you get a ticket to wherever you want to go."

Kat smiled at the lady behind the counter and turned to one of the many kiosks that dispensed tickets. She inserted her credit wafer, selected Jennet, Alta's capital, as her destination and then was presented with a baffling array of options. She could chose a seat, a sleeping berth or a private compartment, and each choice was available with or without meals.

She made her choices, a sleeping berth with one meal seeming to be the best combination of frugality and comfort, and hit the key to complete the transaction. There was a pause, a slight hum and then a chime as the machine spit out a small plastic chit, brightly colored and embossed with the Transportation Authority seal. It was, quite probably, the prettiest thing that Kat had ever seen.

Alta only had two landmasses, one north and one south of the equatorial zone. Jennet was located on the same continent as the port city, but on the far coast, a distance of nearly twenty-thousand kilometers. A train would have to be moving pretty fast to make that distance in the time allotted, she mused as she looked for a sign that would guide her to the proper platform. She had an hour to wait for her train but she didn't want to be searching for the right spot to board at the last minute.

Kat's trip to Jennet erased any lingering doubts about having done the right thing by leaving Ovid. She had spent her life assuming that Ovid was the universe and the universe was Ovid. The government had done such a fine job of controlling information that, while she had been aware of the Union, it was as unreal to her as dragons in the fantasy stories she had enjoyed as a small child. Actually seeing and experiencing a new planet showed her how poor her existence had been and she swore then and there that she would never go back.

Jennet was, area wise anyway, as large as Ovid City had been. It seemed smaller to Kat, but mostly because the tallest buildings were a mere thirty or forty stories and the air was crisp and clean as she stepped off the train. She had been so used to the pollution and smog of her home town that it seemed like the air here was infused with welcome.

She rented a small flop in a boarding house at the edge of the city and set about exploring her new home. She spent a week just walking the city streets, learning where everything was and how things worked. Prices here were a little higher than she was used to but the selection of goods available beggared description. She would need to find employment before too long or face being destitute once more.

Kat's next few months were both a joy and a trial. She didn't have any real marketable skills, not that she could use legally anyway. She drifted from menial job to menial job, trying her hand at a dozen different professions. She might have been completely discouraged if she had not found out about public libraries. A place where she could go and learn, read and just escape from her life for hours at a time, and it was free!

She continued in this way for almost a year before things came to a head. Jennet was a beautiful city, but it was not without its darker side. Crime had a way of following humanity wherever it roamed, riding on the coattails of explorers and colonists, finding a home in the dark corners of society. Kat had been floating along, almost letting herself believe that violence was a thing of her past, left behind on Ovid. Things might have turned out much worse had she not been armed, but she had never stopped carrying her knives, a habit more than because she thought she would need them.