Word Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 9)

by E. M. Foner

  “Our publisher has deep pockets,” Penelope read from her script. “She’s a partner in the most successful human business on the stations.”

  “Is that so?” Bob said. The hologram of the pirate across from Katya that the young reporter was giving voice to drained his glass. “Drink up, shipmates. I’ve heard all I need. Welcome to our crew, Ms. Whacky.”

  “Wysecki,” Penelope corrected him.

  “Suit yourself,” Bob replied magnanimously, rising from the table. The four exited the hologram together.

  “Does anybody want to tell us what Ms. Wysecki got wrong?” Thomas asked.

  “She may as well have begged them to kidnap her,” one of the correspondents observed.

  “Be specific,” Thomas said.

  “Well, she was the only human in a Horten pirate bar and she went in without backup. Then she pointed out something they clearly knew already, that it’s not worth kidnapping stringers collecting video for the Grenouthians because the bunnies would never pay a single cred to get them released. Then she told them that the Galactic Free Press treats her like a valuable employee, and when the pirate followed up to find out if the paper was solvent, she blabbed that the publisher is rich. I would have kidnapped her myself if I was in their shoes.”

  “We started with this reenactment because the lessons are so obvious and I’m sure you’ve all absorbed them,” Thomas said. “Before we move on to the next hologram, which believe it or not starts with a correspondent stowing away on a pirate vessel, can anybody tell us what she could have done differently? Aside from bragging on her employer, that is.”

  “She could have asked questions herself,” Penelope said. “It’s a reporter’s job to ask questions, but it was obvious from the minute she started talking that she thought the job was to get onto their ship. Those two Hortens across from her were so inked up that she probably wouldn’t have seen a skin reaction if they lied to her, but she might have at least tried to set some ground rules before leaving with them.”

  “Anybody else?” Thomas asked.

  “I don’t think she should have been trying to embed with pirates at all,” a younger woman pointed out. “I mean, if you want to write a story about piracy, wouldn’t it make more sense to travel with a merchant ship convoy and to get stories from the victims? Maybe one of the alien navies would let a reporter embed with them on an anti-piracy mission.”

  “I didn’t understand what I read at the beginning, where my pirate said something about their mutual contact and finding a trustworthy crew,” Bob said. “Did anybody go back and find out if the contact basically sold her to these guys?”

  “Excellent question,” Thomas said approvingly. “EarthCent Intelligence was asked to check into the circumstances, and we confirmed that Ms. Wysecki’s contact was a spotter for the pirates, who openly boasted about the commission he received for delivering her.”

  “I’ve never been in the journalism business, but gathering information and cultivating sources for EarthCent Intelligence is about as close as you can get,” Chance said. “I had a long talk with your publisher about the goal of this training course and we agreed on almost every point. Whatever story you’re pursuing, there’s always a bigger picture that you can’t see, so it’s crazy to stake your life on getting just one little bit of information in hopes of scoring a headline. Concentrate on figuring out what’s going on and explaining it to your readers. That’s what the subscribers want.”

  “But getting a scoop has always been the way to move ahead in our business,” a man protested.

  “Your editors and colleagues are holding meetings as we speak to establish new coverage guidelines,” Chance reminded him. “The way your publisher explained it to me, the Galactic Free Press is trying to build a reputation for publishing useful news and getting it right. That means reporting on economic activity, shifts in political alliances that can affect trade, warnings about unsafe regions of space, and interviews with humans who have gone to interesting places and done interesting things. If people want excitement, they can get their fix from the Grenouthians.”

  Eleven

  Dorothy arrived at the Open University exhibition hall expecting the usual formal affair, but it turned out that the calendars of several species were overlapping on the equivalent of a Friday night, so the students and attendees were in party mode. The theme of the exhibit was bar design, and all of the students whose work could potentially be applied to the universal concept of a place to get plastered were displaying their concept pieces. The fact that they were actually distributing drinks added to the celebratory atmosphere.

  “Human?” inquired the Frunge girl at the entrance who was handing out empty metal cups.

  “Yes,” Dorothy said, accepting a cup. “We’re not very rugged, gastronomically speaking.”

  “Try the Frunge ice tea,” the girl suggested. “Just remind them to run it through the grub filter for you.”

  “Grub filter?”

  “You know, the things that eat you from the inside out. Don’t you get grubs?”

  “Worms, maybe,” Dorothy said, not wanting to make the girl feel bad.

  “Just tell them to filter it. I saw a couple of Humans rush out of here earlier holding their stomachs.”

  Dorothy carefully avoided the Frunge ice tea maker on display, though she had to admit it made an intriguing presentation from a safe distance. A machine that looked like one of her father’s old-fashioned compressors huffed away beneath the table, though the motor driving the belt looked like a dummy. She wondered if the concept was copied from human history, the same way she’d borrowed her hat design from the lost-and-found.

  “Try sitting here,” a Verlock rumbled as she passed, though the complete sentence didn’t register until she was almost on to the next display. She turned around and returned to the hulking student, who was gesturing to a sturdy-looking stool with an equally beefy hand.

  “It looks very strong,” Dorothy replied slowly, having plenty of experience with Verlocks. She was surprised to see that the chair was cushioned, given the predilection of the leathery aliens for stone furniture, but when she hopped up onto the seat, a shock ran through her tailbone. An involuntary “Ouch,” escaped her lips.

  “Not good?” the Verlock forced out, looking concerned.

  “The seat is harder than I expected,” Dorothy prevaricated, but then she decided it was more important to give the designer her true reaction than to save his feelings. “Actually, it seems even harder than stone, if that’s possible.”

  “Thank you!” The Verlock looked about as joyous as Dorothy could ever recall seeing one of the normally stoic aliens. “Harder than it looks.”

  Dorothy just nodded and smiled, unsure if the Verlock was referring to the cushion itself or to the labor involved in creating anti-padding. She slid off the stool, rubbed her backside for a moment, and then moved on to the next table, where a Chert girl was waving her hands in the air like a magician.

  “Human?” the Chert’s assistant asked. “You’re pretty enough to be Vergallian.”

  “Uh, thank you, I guess,” Dorothy replied.

  “I’m Tissent, and I’m helping my sister perform her bar concept,” the Chert said, launching into a prepared speech. “Siffra has perfected a form of visual mixology based on hand movements. An array of light beams projected from between the glasses in the overhead rack is detected by sensors in the surface of the bar. This allows an experienced barkeep to mix and match from over one thousand bottles, down to amounts measured in hundreds of molecules. She’s discovered exciting new mixed drinks by concentrating on the aesthetics of the blending motions rather than obsessing about ingredients. What can she make you?”

  “Do you have any human bottles on tap?” Dorothy asked.

  “Hang on a second,” Tissent said, fiddling with something on his shoulder. Dorothy gasped as hundreds of bottles mounted in vertical racks suddenly appeared behind the bar. A thin transparent tube ran from each bottle to a ma
nifold, and the outputs of a number of manifolds were combined into a crystal funnel, under which the Chert placed Dorothy’s cup. Siffra had finished her last drink performance and waited expectantly for the human girl’s order.

  “I think I—no, the label is in Drazen,” Dorothy said cautiously. “Those are all Vergallian with the square bottlenecks, I don’t know what those are, or those. I’m sorry, but the only thing I recognize is the pink bottle there, reconstituted Florida grapefruit juice.”

  The Chert grimaced and muttered something to his sister. Her face fell, and she made a motion like a tomahawk chop through the light beams. The feeder lines all showed pink and the cup filled up with grapefruit juice.

  A passing Horten turned to his companion and said, “What’s the point of that? She moves her hand over the bar and the cup fills up with something. I could do it faster by grabbing the bottle.”

  The Chert student glowered at Dorothy for a brief moment, and then vanished as her brother handed the ambassador’s daughter the cup of juice.

  “Oh, look what you’ve done,” Tissent scolded the human. “I only got her to turn off her invisibility projector a few minutes ago. The whole visual concept doesn’t work if people can’t see her moving her arms.”

  “Can she mix drinks if she’s invisible?” Dorothy couldn’t help asking.

  “Of course,” the Chert replied. “She’s not really invisible, you know. You just can’t see her because her projector is feeding your eyes false images. It doesn’t trick the light beams.” He turned away from the ambassador’s daughter and began pleading with the empty space. “Come on, Siffra. Everybody loved it. You can’t go by what a couple of Hortens think just because the Human doesn’t know how to order a drink.”

  “Hey, Dorothy,” Chance said, approaching the table. “Is she playing a Sharf mixology organ? I don’t really care about the taste as long as it burns, but I like to watch.”

  “You can see her?” the Chert’s brother inquired.

  “I’m an artificial so my frame rate is way higher than you biologicals,” Chance replied immodestly. “How about something strong? You pick it.”

  “Did you hear that, Siffra?” Tissent said. “I’ll bet she’d like to watch a Slice and Dice.”

  “Wow!” Chance said, as drops of liquid began to fall into the fresh cup. “She’s really great. I shouldn’t have compared your device to a Sharf mixology organ. This is much better.”

  Siffra flickered back into existence, and Chance gave Dorothy a wink as the Chert student waved her hands through the air like a mad orchestra conductor. A group of people gathered to watch, and as near as Dorothy could tell, the mixologist was pulling just a drop or two out of each bottle. Finally, she stopped moving and nodded to her brother. He brought out a small lighter and lit the drink, which burned with a translucent blue flame.

  Chance accepted the cup and tossed back the concoction, smacking her lips. The spectators applauded and began calling out drink orders to the Chert girl, whose invisibility projector remained inactive. Her brother nodded his thanks to Chance as the artificial person drew Dorothy away.

  “I’ve never seen you at one of the Open University student exhibitions before,” the ambassador’s daughter said. “Are you thinking about taking a course?”

  “Moi?” Chance replied with an exaggerated French accent, putting her hand on her chest. “I came because Thomas dragged me, though I ditched him for fun a few minutes ago. He says it’s important we keep up with the latest in bar design concepts for professional reasons. Where’s your man?”

  “David’s working. I have to come to these exhibitions as part of my Open University design program.”

  “You see? I told you school is a drag on creativity,” Chance said, guiding Dorothy past a display of iron-banded bottles suspended in a magnetic field for no apparent purpose. “Oh, there’s Thomas. Let’s go this way.”

  The artificial person pulled Dorothy into a curtained-off section of the exhibition hall, where the lighting was so dim that the girl could barely make out the hand in front of her face.

  “I can’t see a thing,” she complained.

  “Your eyes will adjust in a minute. The Grenouthians prefer their bars to be very dark because it reminds them of burrows or something. Do you think Thomas saw us?”

  “Why are you ducking him?”

  “Practice. The training camp has been so busy lately that I rarely get a chance to go out on real missions, and Thomas has practically given up ever getting back into the field. How can we maintain our edge if all we do is run around Mac’s Bones all day?”

  “I don’t know,” Dorothy replied. “I mean, it’s not like Dad and Woojin have to go back to being mercenaries to teach self-defense.”

  “Have your eyes adjusted? It’s starting.”

  Dorothy peered around in the dark, trying to see what Chance was talking about, and she finally spotted what looked like silvery bubbles rising inside of a transparent cylinder. The illumination level increased in small but discrete increments, as if somebody were turning a mechanical switch with a hundred detents, and the barely visible audience began to make appreciative noises. Dorothy realized that there were a number of the bubbling columns in the curtained-off area which had initially been blocked from view by the other guests.

  “I don’t get it,” Dorothy whispered to Chance. “What’s the big deal about putting bubble lights in a bar?”

  “They aren’t just lights,” the artificial person said in her normal register. “Can’t you see the taps at the bottom?”

  “They’re lighting fixtures and they’re giant bottles?”

  “More like light-kegs I’d say,” Chance replied. “The Grenouthians did a documentary on Earth breweries a few cycles ago that wasn’t entirely insulting. We all watched it with your dad after training camp one day. I’ll bet these students have figured out a way to brew an intoxicant in the style of human beer that works on Grenouthians. The light show is just a way to market it to bunnies who aren’t used to bubbly drinks.”

  “But the Grenouthians have been around almost as long as the Verlocks, millions of years,” Dorothy said. “They’re always going on about how they don’t have anything to learn from us. How can something like beer be new to them?”

  “You take it for granted because you grew up with your father home-brewing on the lower deck of your home,” Chastity explained. She had to raise her voice to talk over the enthusiastic response of the bunnies who were quaffing samples of brew from the light columns. “Let’s get going. Thomas must have passed by now.”

  “We’re coming with you,” said a voice at Dorothy’s side. She turned to see the Vergallian couple from the artist’s party which Tinka had attended with the painful poet. “I wondered if I would run into you again,” the woman continued. “I’m Affie and this is Stick.”

  “I’m Dorothy and this is Chance,” the ambassador’s daughter replied, though she couldn’t help wondering when Vergallians had become so friendly. Then she caught a telltale whiff of Kraaken stick and guessed that the name that the male went under wasn’t the same one his parents had given him at birth. “Are you both students?”

  “I am,” Affie replied as they emerged from the Grenouthian area back onto the main exhibition floor. “Stick just hangs around bothering me and doing a little business. Come on. A bunch of us are meeting in the Drazen lounge.”

  Dorothy turned to check with Chance, but the artificial person was crouching behind a Verlock, making a face and pointing back towards the entrance. The ambassador’s daughter looked around and saw that Thomas was headed directly for them. Turning to tell Chance that she’d probably been spotted would certainly have given away her position, so Dorothy settled for muttering, “I think the jig is up,” out of the corner of her mouth, and tried to look casual as she fell in beside Affie.

  “So what are you studying?” the Vergallian woman asked.

  “I’m into fashion and clothing design. I wanted to start a business with my
Gem friend, but she went back to their homeworld to sleep until they grow a male clone for her.”

  “You’re so lucky. I never had a clone friend and we didn’t get any aliens visiting our settlement. I never thought I’d convince my family to let me study on a station, but then my oldest sister had triplets, all girls, so now I’m far enough down the succession line to be free of it all. I always wanted to visit the tunnel network.”

  “So you’re not from the Empire of a Hundred Worlds,” Dorothy remarked. “I wondered why you were so different from the upper caste Vergallians I’ve met.”

  “I’m from fleet, though my family are planet-side now. We never went along with that tech-ban craziness that the Empire uses to maintain the status quo. My presentation piece to get accepted in the Open University sculpture program depicted a dying mercenary slashing at a battle cruiser with a sword.”

  “Except she does abstract,” Stick interjected. “It looks like two melted blobs connected by a cube.”

  “That sounds very interesting,” Dorothy said politely.

  “Anyway, I came at a good time,” Affie continued. “Nothing much happens on the stations for a hundred thousand years or so, and then some new species comes along and shakes things up for a while. You always see it first in the visual arts. Sculpture is like the radiation detector in the core.”

  “The canary in the coal mine,” Dorothy surmised.

  “A little bird underground?” The Vergallian girl frowned, trying to make sense of what her translation implant had fed her. “Oh, I get it. A low-tech poison gas detector. Hey, should we light a stinker before we go in, Stick?”

  The Vergallian male lived up to his name by pulling a stick of Kraaken Red out of his vest and lighting the end. Then he blew on it, putting out the flame but causing the ember to glow brightly. When he stopped blowing, it began to smoke. He held it under his nose, inhaled, and passed the stick to Dorothy.