Guest Night on Union Station (4 page)

“It’s a manicure tool of some sort,” Flazint replied. “We get lots of them in here. I’m not sure about the species, though. Something with pretty big claws, I’d guess.”

Dorothy placed it on the holo-platform and gave it a spin.

“Huktra talon clipper and file,” the voice identified the tool.

“What’s the grossest thing you ever found?” Dorothy asked her mentor, as she searched for a place to store the talon clipper on a shelf.

“Medical stuff,” the other girl replied without hesitation. “There are plenty of jars with body parts on the shelves, embryos in portable stasis fields, vat-grown replacement organs that got lost along the way. Nobody ever seems to claim those, so it might all be black market.”

“Is there any way to figure out where the bots found the stuff?”

“Sure, it’s part of the permanent record. The bots image everything they find before they pick it up, and it all gets correlated by the storage system. Take something off the shelf and ask about it.”

Dorothy pulled out the object next to where she had just stored the talon clippers and found it was a short tube with a small, round can on one side. The can had a handle on it, like a pepper-mill or a coffee grinder, and there was a little hollow sphere snugged up to one end of the tube.

“Any ideas?” she asked the Frunge girl.

“I think it’s a Vergallian fishing pole. Look for a button on the side, but don’t point it at me.”

Dorothy quickly found a small sliding switch on the side of the tube and pushed it forward. The tube leapt in her hand, the end telescoping out to twice her height, the fishing bob dangling at the tip.

“Hey, they run the line inside the pole. My dad might like one of these.”

“I hope we can figure out how to collapse it again because it will never fit on the shelf that way,” Flazint said.

Dorothy pulled the slide switch back, but nothing happened.

“No luck. Maybe the tip needs to be pushed in.” She carefully brought the tip of the rod down behind the counter and pressed the end against the bulkhead. Instead of retracting, the rod bent when she pushed. Dorothy stepped back, and to her relief, it returned to being a straight pole.

“Were you holding the button while you did that?”

“Yeah. Maybe the battery is dead,” Dorothy speculated. “Libby? How can I make this fishing pole retract?”

“Hold the button and reel in the line,” the Stryx librarian replied. “It may feel a little tight, but the bob is compressing a permanent spring. Don’t worry about the line snapping.

As Dorothy gingerly reeled in the bob, a handsome Vergallian wearing rubber boots strode up to the counter.

“Be careful with that,” he ordered peremptorily. “I paid fourteen hundred creds for that pole, and I just spent two weeks during the Ferlock run on Thuri Minor twiddling my thumbs.”

Dorothy flushed and began to mumble an excuse, but the Frunge girl was having none of it.

“Who spends fourteen hundred creds on a fishing pole and then loses it right before vacation? Anyway, for all we know, you came in here looking for something else and you just decided to upgrade. Do you know where you lost it?”

The Vergallian glowered at the girls as he considered giving them a piece of his mind, but he was so relieved to find that the pole hadn’t been stolen he decided to play along.

“Sure. I know I had it in the departure lounge for the luxury liner to Thuri Minor because I took it out of my bag to admire it. I’d bought it specifically for the vacation, you see.” He furrowed his brows in concentration. “We had some time before boarding, and I remember that I went to buy some snacks. All I can think is that I must have left it at the kiosk because I needed both hands to carry back the tray.

“Where was the fishing pole stored at JER 16/16 found?” Dorothy asked the cataloging system.

“Vergallian Ferlock Pro, Deluxe Model, discovered under Star Ways departure lounge seat on…”

“That’s enough,” Dorothy cut off the voice. “The owner is reclaiming the fishing pole, and the talon clipper is stored at JER 16/16 now.”

“Huktra talon clipper and file, stored at location JER 16/16,” the cataloging system’s voice acknowledged.

“Thanks,” the Vergallian said. He accepted the fully retracted pole from Dorothy and turned to go. Then he remembered his manners and slapped a five-cred coin on the counter as a tip.

“You should take that,” Dorothy told the Frunge girl. “I’m just in training.”

“If you’re sure,” Flazint replied, picking up the coin. She turned her head a little and watched the Vergallian exiting the room. “He lost it less than two Klunks ago, right? Want to see something funny?”

“Sure,” Dorothy replied, wondering what the Frunge girl might have in mind.

“Librarian. Does security imaging for the Star Ways departure lounge where the item from JER 16/16 was lost include footage of how the pole got under the seat?”

“Affirmative,” Libby replied.

A hologram sprang to life over the turntable. It showed the bustling departure lounge, zooming in on a handsome Vergallian, who had one arm around a beautiful woman as he admired his Ferlock Pro rod. After a few minutes of this, he opened a piece of luggage and wrapped the collapsed rod tenderly in what appeared to be a woman’s nightgown. The hologram caught a look of fury flashing across the woman’s face, which then took on an expression of intense concentration. She said something to the man, who rose and headed off to a food kiosk.

As soon as his back was turned, the beautiful Vergallian woman thumbed open the bag, unwrapped the fishing rod, and then carefully refolded the nightgown, patting it gently into place. Then she stuck the Ferlock Pro under the seat. When the man returned with a couple of drinks and some salty snacks, she was all smiles.

“How did she get away with that?” Dorothy asked the Frunge girl.

“Didn’t you see when she got all focused there for a couple of seconds?” Flazint asked. “She was zapping him with pheromones. She must have wiped out the last minute of his memory so he wouldn’t remember packing the rod and then sent him for snacks. High-caste Vergallian women are scary.”

Four

“So I’m supposed to find host families amongst the Union Station ambassadors for the visiting diplomats?” Kelly asked.

“Just the top emissaries,” Libby reassured her. “The guests from the member worlds of the Cayl Empire who take advantage of the temporary tunnel will eventually number in the hundreds of thousands. Most of those will be from the local ruling classes, and they may prefer sleeping on their luxury ships to staying at the best hotels that can meet their physiological requirements. But it’s been our experience over the years that getting the important diplomatic representatives to live quietly with an unrelated species on the station for a couple of weeks before the open house officially begins can make all of the difference in the outcome. While the temporary tunnel is open to bring the emissaries here, we’ll send a sort of an exchange delegation in the opposite direction.”

“Well, I’ll try my best, but arranging confidential sleepovers for advanced aliens who rule star systems isn’t something I do every day. We could put a few up in Mac’s Bones, of course, maybe the whole bunch if they have small enough ships to park in the campgrounds.”

“The idea is to get as many tunnel species involved as possible. Even if it was practical for you to provide lodging for all of the emissaries, it would be tantamount to putting all of our eggs in one basket, not to mention arousing the jealousy of the other ambassadors who already have issues with EarthCent.”

“So I need to convince the least friendly ambassadors from the Naturals League to host an alien emissary from the Cayl Empire?”

“I knew you’d agree,” Libby said, choosing to ignore the question in Kelly’s tone. “I have a presentation on the emissaries ready to show you, but I thought you might want to bring in some of your support staff.”

“Donna for sure, and she should be arriving at any minute. Daniel has enough to do getting ready for CoSHC, but I’d want to get somebody from EarthCent Intelligence in here. Maybe Chastity as well, since her paper will be covering the event.”

“Do you want me to contact them and see if they’re available now?”

“Yes, please,” Kelly replied. “Is there a precedent for calling a meeting with the other ambassadors for the sake of discussing who is willing to put up a visiting emissary?”

“Such a meeting takes place every open house, though none of the current ambassadors were present the last time we had one on Union Station. If you’d like, I’ll contact the ambassadors whose living quarters offer a potential match for our guests and arrange for a meeting.”

“That will be a great help. For a minute there, I thought I was going to have to go around begging.”

“Begging may still be required,” Libby informed her. “Donna just arrived in the outer office, and Chastity and Clive are on their way. Chastity was just wrapping up her morning practice with Marcus, and I caught Clive as he was dropping the twins off at my school.”

“Don’t you think three hours a day after school is a bit much for six-year-olds to spend practicing ballroom dancing?” Kelly blurted out the question before she could stop herself. “I know they have a lot of energy, but still…”

“As their godmother and school teacher, I admit I do monitor their sessions,” Libby replied thoughtfully. “Vivian would gladly dance twice as long, but Jonah will probably quit before he turns seven. According to Jeeves, he’s only stuck it out this long because he knows how much his sister enjoys it.”

“They do get along well for siblings. Sometimes it goes the other way with twins.”

“Knock, knock,” Donna said, entering the office. “Libby told me that we’re having a meeting. I put on the coffee for Chastity and Clive, and it looks like you already bought donuts.”

“Donut. It was just the one and I didn’t have breakfast,” Kelly added defensively, crumpling the empty bag to dispose of the evidence.

“Who else is coming?”

“Clive and Chastity are it unless—hello, Thomas. Are you here for the meeting?”

“Clive pinged and asked me to come,” Thomas replied. “With Lynx and Woojin checking up on the new field offices and Blythe only working part-time, I’m sort of number two in the organization.”

“Two and a half,” Kelly corrected him.

“Anyway, Herl was on the station last night and we had a meeting about the Cayl Empire,” Thomas said. “It turns out that the Grenouthians sent a documentary crew to visit the Cayl less than ten thousand years ago, so I spent the whole night watching the episodes that Libby dug up for me. It seems that one of the species, the Shuga, once went so far as to purpose-build artificial people to act as their ruling class. Could you imagine humans ever doing such a thing?”

“Not really, no,” Kelly said. “Besides, as long as we’re part of the tunnel network, it wouldn’t make sense. As soon as the Stryx recognized our purpose-built leaders as sentient, they could walk away and find something more interesting to do than supervising humans. Wouldn’t you?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Thomas admitted.

“Libby?” Donna asked. “Are there any Shugas coming to the open house?”

“They accepted the invitation, and one of the emissaries will be a Shuga,” the station librarian replied. “Clive and Chastity are entering the outer office.”

“Bring your own chairs,” Kelly hollered towards her open door.

“Nothing like a Monday morning meeting,” Clive said, entering Kelly’s office with a chair in each hand. “Did you do a sweep, Thomas?”

“As soon as I came in,” the artificial person replied, waggling his little finger. “This built-in sniffer is worth every cred.”

“Hi, all,” Chastity greeted them, entering the room immediately after Clive. “Thanks for inviting me. Shall I assume this is on deep background?”

“Yes,” Kelly replied. “Strictly off the record. I know that you’ll be covering the open house once it officially begins whether the Stryx invite the press or not, but I’d prefer to coordinate ahead of time so we can avoid the problems we ran into at the last CoSHC conference.”

“I created an employee handbook to specifically prohibit a repeat of that behavior,” Chastity replied. “I admit it was totally unprofessional, and the only thing I can say in our defense is that the reporter in question was employed by EarthCent Intelligence for two years before we hired him away.”

“I train them to take lots of pictures,” Thomas interjected modestly.

“I understand, and I appreciate that you didn’t publish any of those images, Chastity,” Kelly said. “In this case, a Stryx open house is new for all of us, so there will be plenty of room for mistakes. Libby has prepared a presentation to give us an idea of what to expect from the primary species. Also, I just learned that one of my duties as hostess is to find families in the diplomatic community willing to invite an alien emissary to live with them for a quiet get-acquainted.”

“That should be interesting,” Donna commented dryly.

“Libby? Do you want to start now?” Kelly asked.

The Stryx librarian brought to life above the ambassador’s display desk a three-dimensional map showing the Cayl Empire. “I’ve adjusted the sizes of the stars and the distances between them for the sake of illustration,” Libby said, getting right down to business. “You’ll notice that the Cayl expanded their holdings in a controlled manner, so they rule a roughly spherical volume of space with their home system at the center. In recent millennia, they’ve been turning down invitations to conquer bordering species, in some cases even ignoring military provocations because they didn’t want to overextend their interior lines of supply and communications.”

“Smart,” Clive said. “No point fighting wars so far from home that you can’t defend what you take without spending a fortune.”

“I’m only showing the stars with occupied planets in this hologram, and I’ve colored them according to the four main factions within the empire. While the Cayl are in control of military defense and certain judicial functions, the day-to-day life in their empire is dominated by four advanced species and their followers. The stars I’m pulsing red now are under the economic control of the Shuga, whom Thomas was talking about just a few minutes ago.”

“What do they look like?” Chastity interrupted.

A silver-skinned creature with a crest of feathers replaced the map. The hologram began rotating slowly, showing two arms and two legs, though the neck was about twice as long as one would have expected given the other proportions. There was a large lump in the Shuga’s belly that made it look like the creature had swallowed a cantaloupe.

“Is it pregnant?” Chastity asked.

“Incubating an egg,” the station librarian replied. “The males and females both have an external pouch for carrying eggs and keeping them warm, and they share the incubation duties after the female lays the egg.”

“So they might be comfortable with the Fillinducks, since they’re egg layers, or with the Grenouthians, since they have pouches,” Kelly ventured. “Who’s next?”

The Shuga was replaced by the holographic map, and a section of blue stars now pulsed alongside the red.

“Is it my imagination or are the blue star systems and red star systems basically alternating?” Clive asked.

“Precisely,” Libby replied. “I’ll add the others since you’ve already spotted the pattern.”

An approximately equivalent number of green and yellow stars began pulsing, and it became obvious to everyone that although each of the factions controlled about the same number of systems, they were all mixed together, as if the empire had been stirred in three dimensions to create an even distribution.

“So the Cayl kept their subjects weak by not allowing any of them to control contiguous blocks of space,” Kelly surmised.

“Not weak, but diffused,” Libby replied. “The absolute distance between planetary systems is mainly an economic barrier, the price of the energy involved in making faster-than-light jumps. The Cayl use their power to ensure that the factions within their empire always have economic incentives to maintain strong ties with their neighbors, rather than becoming mini-empires within a protectorate. It’s proved to be a very stable system.”

“Who are the other dominant species?” Chastity asked.

The map was again replaced by an alien form, this one sporting four arms and a trunk in place of a nose.

“Four arms makes it a candidate for a Dollnick sleepover, and that tentacle might put the Drazens at ease,” Kelly said.

“It’s a trunk if they breathe through it,” Donna observed. “Tentacles are for grabbing stuff.”

“He looks like Ganesh,” Chastity declared. “Don’t you recognize him from Aisha’s collection? He’s the Hindu god of something.”

“So you think I should invite him to stay with us?”

“The alien you are referring to is a Nangor, and he wouldn’t be comfortable in your home. The Nangors are herbivores and great gardeners, so he would find the metallic environment in Mac’s Bones too sterile,” Libby explained.

“Who else?” Chastity asked.

The Nangor was replaced by a figure that looked a little like an elongated turtle. The torso was definitely encased in a shell of sorts, but it didn’t look like there could possibly be room inside for the creature to retract its arms and legs. The head, on the other hand, was practically neck-less, and the skull was topped with small armored plates, rather than hair.

“Are they good at math?” Kelly asked. “It reminds me of the Verlocks for some reason.”

“The Tzvim are indeed accomplished mathematicians,” Libby replied. “Their early history was similar to that of the Tharks, a military species that nearly wiped itself out. In spite of its appearance, the Tzvim are the most peaceable and friendly of the leading Cayl Empire cultures.”

“Isn’t there one more dominant species?” Chastity asked.

“The Lood,” Libby acknowledged. The hologram switched to a figure wearing a brilliant purple cloak edged with white fur. A full-faced golden mask hid the creature’s features, but the contours appeared to be the same as a human face. The arms, legs, hands and feet all agreed with human proportions as well.

“Is there something behind the mask we shouldn’t see?” Donna asked.

“The Lood are similar to the Vergallians in many ways,” Libby replied. “Their ruling class can be easily distinguished from the commoners by appearance, namely the presence of the all-seeing eye.” The golden mask dissolved, and the humans winced at the beautiful face marred by an eye in the middle of the forehead.

“Ugh,” Donna said for them all.

“Does the third eye give them special powers?” Clive asked.

“That’s the tricky part,” Libby replied. “The ruling-class Lood males are capable of compelling some humanoid species to obey them, and the ruling-class women can detect falsehoods, creating a sort of balance of power. We aren’t positive about whether the Loods will be able to influence or read humans because the two species have never been in contact before.”

“You mean one of those guys could turn us into zombies?” Kelly demanded.

“In terms of capabilities and persistence, the effects the elite male Loods can produce are similar to what upper-class Vergallian women do with pheromones.”

“You’re not giving me a lot of confidence,” Kelly retorted. “Do you want me to put up these mind-stealers in Mac’s Bones?”