The Amalthea Zephyr was impressive. I had seen great cathedrals and mighty starships of course, but both of those things were built for simple and brutal purposes. The Zephyr was not brutal. The engine was over fifty meters long and half that thick, a great blunt nosed wedge of ivory and bright brass, studded with observation turrents, smoke stacks, and vox antenaes worked to look like saints holding aloft scrolls of Imperial wisdom. The cars it pulled were scarecelly less ornate, twenty of them, each thirty meters long and lined with armorcys that was opaque from without, but so clear from the inner side as to seem open air. The advertisments claimed that every amenity was to be found on board: Three restuarants, gambling tables, gaming of all kinds, massage parlors, even an indoor sports arena. 

It was said that any pleasure you could imagine was available about the Zephyr, and pleasures you couldn't would be provided upon request.

The platform was already crowded with people looking to explore those very pleasures. Some of them were nobles, whose retinues kept the crowds back with staves or ceremonial two handed swords. Others were bussiness people, ship captains, guilders who were springing for a few days of luxury before heading back to their important lives, distinguished by bussiness suits or gowns cut to some imitation of court fashion. Some were on honeymoons, or simply well to do commoners who had saved to experience the trip of a lifetime. All were presenting carved ivory tickets which were themselves a work of art while the great locomotive took on water for its powerplant from thick hoses that fed into it like tentacles emerging from a cephalopod. 

Luggage flowed into the belly of the beast on guilded servitors, each artfully wrought to resemble a beast of burden in silver and onyx. Our own luggage had already been collected, Hadrian having been compelled to pay extra for the security of unsearched baggage given the nature of some of our possessions. These would be kept in the void shielded cargo bellies of the cars. Ledgend had it that more than one heist had been attempted, the value of so many wealthy patrons personal effects being beyond easy calculation, but those ledgends assured customers that those attempts had been repulsed bloodily by state of the art combat servitors engaged for the purpose. 

I stepped out of the air car dressed in my finiest. My finest in this case being a black dress that fell clingingly to my hips before dropping to the ground with a side slit which revealed black lace stockings of surpassing quality. A ring of static charge kept the hem of the dress from every quite touching the ground, giving me the appearance of gliding. Nor was that the only surprise the dress held. It's midnight black silk was microslited over a peralescent white under fabric, so that when the fabric pulled tight over my body the slits tended to open making me appear to shimmer with emphasising starlight. I had ice diamonds and neck and wrist and a rather unncessary cumberbund of white shimmer silk around my waist. The entire ensemble was finished with a coronet of wrought silver from which depended a black veil which fell to my crimson painted lips.

"Shall we alight?" I asked Hadrian with a smile.