Antek, Julia, Igor, and Lena arrive at Earth’s first orbital hotel expecting luxury and get something far stranger instead.
It was nearly midnight when Antek, Julia, Igor, and Lena stepped through the glass doors of the Asteroid Hotel, the first place in orbit where you could order champagne and watch the planet roll silently beneath your feet. A week earlier, they had won their stay on a TV quiz show called Space Showdown. Now they stood in the lobby with their suitcases, grinning like idiots and trying not to look as overwhelmed as they felt.
The corridor beyond reception seemed to go on forever, lit by strips of pale blue light that made everyone look faintly ill and deeply important. The floor gave a nervous little shiver under their shoes, as if the whole station were clearing its throat.
Behind the desk waited Gucio, the hotel robot. He had a polished metal moustache, immaculate manners, and a voice so calm it was almost suspicious. “Welcome to Asteroid Hotel,” he said. “I apologise for the temporary instability in gravity. The system resets at this hour.”
As if on cue, Julia lifted a few centimetres off the floor with a startled yelp, and Igor’s suitcase burst open, scattering socks printed with Martian chickens across the lobby.
Gucio handed them their key-holograms. “Your rooms are on the fourth level. Door code: space peppers. Breakfast is served on the ceiling.”
“Of course it is,” Lena muttered, taking her key and eyeing the corridor like it had personally offended her.
They rode the capsule elevator upward in a silence broken only by the soft hum of machinery and the occasional thump from behind the walls. It sounded less like a hotel and more like something large, hungry, and poorly assembled was trying to live inside it.
“What is that?” Julia asked.
“Either ventilation,” said Igor, “or a buffalo with a secret.”
At the fourth floor, Lena led the way to their room. Before she could touch the door, Igor stopped short and pointed at the wall beside it.
“It’s soft.”
He pressed a finger into the panel. It gave way like warm pastry.
Antek laughed, because that was what Antek did when things became alarming, and shoved harder. The wall folded inward without resistance, and all four of them stumbled through it into a room washed in violet light.
In the centre stood a massive coffee machine, gleaming and hissing, ringed by a dozen yellow hamsters sitting upright in transparent cylinders. Each one was chattering furiously, as though in the middle of a business meeting no outsider had been invited to attend.
One of the hamsters rolled forward on a tiny monocycle and fixed them with a hard, beady stare.
“Who dares interrupt our annual Caffeine Ball?” it demanded.
The coffee machine gave a deep, ominous gurgle. Somewhere overhead, glittering coffee beans began to fall like metallic rain.