Hundred did not consider herself an impatient woman. She was not designed for impatience. She was designed to fetishize progress, but that was hardly synonymous. The shuttle airlock was not exceptionally slow. It was designed for relative efficiency. It was not sapient. It had no agency in determining how long it took to cycle the internal atmosphere of the airlock. It was most certainly not going at an agonizingly slow pace just to irritate Hundred. The notion was logically absurd. Hundred glared at a spot on the inside of the airlock beneath the emergency warnings. It was a brand. It said OTIS. Oribital Transit Intelligent Systems. Hundred frowned. OTIS was owned by the Gyges Consortium. Finally the external airlock door parted silently, opening into the vast, hot void of space.
Gently, Hundred lifted off of the shuttle floor as her inertia and that of the shuttle grew subtly out of sync. The Dust around her remained static, she gently lifted her arms. The Dust surged into motion, collecting around her, it flowed into points behind the shoulders and ankles of her suit, energy focused with perfect synchronicity. Hundred smiled to herself, and flew into space on scintillating wings of golden, star Dust. Space expanded around her. She had seen cosmological maps before, projected in ultimate fidelity across her senses by the most sophisticated sensory induction technology Gyges entertainment systems could provide. But it was a poor phantom to the sensation of her first space walk. The dualism of the feeling of being completely weightless, free from discernible gravity. Detached physically from all other matter and to see farther and wider into the cosmos than even the most sophisticated of optics could ever fully encapsulate. To feel complete solitude and silence. To see the dance of septuple star systems, the birthing pains of vast, vibrant nebula as they twisted into trapezia. To see the matter and energy of the biological body reflected and reflecting the symmetry of the cosmos. Hundred spun quietly in the void, solemnly observing the little sliver of creation visible between the shuttle and the other ship. She looked to her relative down, staring between her legs at the spiraling trail of Dust in her wake, and the rapidly diminishing shuttle. Immediately reality snapped back. Her head snapped up. The Lone Star was upon her. Hundred frowned again. No, she was upon it. The fluid in her suit compressed and contused as she tightened her core and inverted her person and perception. She was moving faster than she should. The Dust surged around her, sifting between her and the Star, conforming itself into a drag net, letting the friction of her suit passing through it slow her ascension turned dissension, deflecting off of her form into new helical, fractal patterns. She was still moving too fast. She hit the Star, her thighs contracted, her suit magnetizing itself to the hull, she stuck the landing in a crouch. Space was silent. It was disappointing at times. She would have made a satisfying sound in her landing.
Hundred straightened and took stock of her surroundings. The hull of the Lone Star was so close and far from the rest of the cosmos, physically, chemically, aesthetically. It's ablative plating was pitted and scored with tiny craters, corroded by caustic, astral grime. It was, by all accounts, an ugly piece of work. The docking airlock was 23.788 meters to her general right. She had miscalculated her landing. Hundred frowned. Striding purposefully towards the opening the Dust flowed back around her from it's playful space sojourn. Spreading her gloved hands forward, the Dust blanketed into a shimmering fog over the airlock, analyzing it's chemo-spatial composition, feeding it's findings into her skull. Hundred frowned. She turned away from the airlock door, walking a few feet away from her original goal. She breathed deep of the reconstituted atmosphere of her suit. Lifting her arms over her head the Dust spouted back into space, weaving into a cyclonic ring of material. Countless fragments of machine particulate separated itself from the ring, imploding into the center of the ring, smashing and sealing together and swiftly a shape emerged. It was a lance. It was 14 meters long. It was 3 molecules thick. Hundred dropped her arms sharply. The lance stabbed downward into the Star's hull, boring between two imperfectly situated plates. The nano-materials drilling a tiny corridor into the ships interior, fragmenting off to secure the molecular passage. Lifting one arm more Dust separated itself from the maelstrom above her, diving into the new means of ingress, shooting down into the works of the interior wall she had funneled it into. It spread between circuitry and ductwork, wires and pipes. It found the capacitors of the old airlock door, mingling with the inert chemicals that once powered the great plasteel plates of the lock. The busy Dust agitated and rearranged molecules, feeding phasically innervated energy into the cold, decayed atoms. It rearranged conductor plates and repaired brakes in the energy system. More Dust surged into the interior of the airlock, working on the overly oxidized gearwork of the airlock doors. While the Dust worked her will Hundred walked back to the doors, stopping with the toes of her boots just over the precipice. She looked up at the shuttle. Even the bliss of her solipsistic space sojourn had to end. Nothing in the universe was ever truly stagnant. Her comm chirped an affirmation.
"The airlock is viable, pilot. Dock." Punctuating her statement, the Star's airlock slowly cycled open, brute mechanisms grinding into motion. It would have made a fantastic, deathly groan. It did not. Space, as ever, was silent.
