The sunlight of Losa A slanted in from one astronomical unit away, casting the cargo ship belonging to Sonia's family against the outer wall of the spaceport. Its shadow stretched long.
The words "Riverbend Golden Bear Ranch" on the hull reflected the sunlight. Her father and younger brother had painted the big letters using stencils. They'd worked at it all day, but the lettering was still a little crooked. She couldn't bring herself to wipe it off.
As for the ship, they'd picked it up at a secondhand market three years ago. It had been converted from an assault landing craft decommissioned by the Alliance Space Fleet. The engine was a little loud, but it ran, and it had no trouble entering or leaving the atmosphere.
Actually, with Sonia's connections these days, she could have found a way to
The spaceport dock, meanwhile, had been built with money pooled by the ranchers. The bearings and energy core were secondhand salvage, and they'd welded the hull out of armor plating from a retired destroyer. That was how they'd made a space city hanging in orbit around Losa.
The spaceport wasn't large, but it could still accommodate twelve interplanetary cargo ships weighing ten thousand tons each.
Its warehouses had limited capacity, but they had all the essentials: dry storage, high-humidity storage, chilled storage, and freezers.
Right now, the spaceport's warehouses were packed to the rafters with produce from Losa's farms.
Frozen black beef was stacked like a city wall, and tanks of synthetic protein were piled into pyramids. Of course, there were all kinds of grains, too, piled into small hills in the cargo holds.
Robots bustled in and out of the warehouses, which were so crammed that goods were nearly spilling out. Every last one of them seemed on the verge