Xenotech What Happens: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 3)

by Dave Schroeder

  When the train stopped, I stood up and ran along the cars until I was near the middle and could go either way once I spotted Cornell. I slapped my palm against my forehead when I realized I should have borrowed Poly’s phone so I could have communicated with my phone hanging on to Cornell’s belt. Too late for that now. The train’s doors opened. I looked for Cornell, spotted him below me, and launched myself off the roof.

  I’d hoped to land on Cornell, but hadn’t factored in the size of the crowd aboard the train. Instead of landing on my quarry, I crashed onto a female Pyr wearing a 1920s-style cloche hat and six strands of pearls. The Pyr broke my fall without any damage to her person, thank goodness—Pyrs are resilient and squishable—but my foot caught in her pearls, breaking all six strands and sending small opalescent spheres skittering across the platform.

  After I bounced off the elegantly dressed Pyr, I rolled into two Short Pâkk businessmen in leather vests, knocking both of them down. I scrambled to my feet, but wasn’t standing for long when one of the Short Pâkks’ fists intersected with my jaw and changed my spatial orientation from vertical to horizontal. I should have expected it. Short Pâkk dominance reactions are almost reflexive. This one delayed me for several seconds—time I desperately needed to locate Cornell.

  “Sorry about that,” I said from my vantage point looking up from the surface of the platform. I tried showing an appropriately submissive attitude to defuse the situation, but it didn’t do any good. As soon as I was on my feet again, the other Short Pâkk businessman hit me twice in the stomach, doubling me over despite my pupa silk shirt distributing the force of the blow. Both growled at me, then the first one kicked me in the butt and sent me sliding across the platform, helped along by dozens of pearls. While all this was happening, the Pyr female I’d landed on initially was screaming for the police with all four of her mouths. It wasn’t my day.

  I was face down on the ground with my stomach, jaw, and tailbone aching. That position gave me a lovely view of the monorail pulling out as it headed toward its next northbound stop. Then my phone crawled into my visual range on cilia extruded from its Orishen mutacase.

  “Bad news,” it said.

  I rolled my eyes. The hits just kept on coming.

  My phone continued. “Cornell got away.”

  Apparently, our quarry had noticed my phone on his belt after I’d tried—and failed—to jump him. He’d ditched my resourceful device and taken off down the escalators into the Convention Center. With more than a hundred thousand beings at GALTEX, our odds of finding him again were small. Then I looked up and got some good news, of a sort. Poly and her dirigible were hovering above the empty monorail tracks in front of me.

  “Get up, Jack,” she said. “We have to get out of here before the next train arrives.”

  “Right,” I said, picking myself off the platform while rubbing various sore spots. I started to walk and nearly slipped on more pearls, skidding in Poly’s direction. It felt like trying to move on a frictionless surface. When my phone hopped back on my belt, it wisely refrained from noting my lack of coordination.

  “It would be smart to not be here when the police arrive,” I said. “We’ve also got to return your airship and get back to the Expo.”

  “Can we grab some lunch in there, too?” asked Poly. “All this excitement’s made me hungry.”

  She was smiling. This was what she’d signed up for when she became my business partner.

  “Hot dogs are on me,” I said.

  Trade show cuisine at its finest.

  Chapter 8

  “A good roommate may be the single most important thing

  to have when one is away at school.”

  — Barbara Dana

  We spotted the GalCon Systems dirigible hovering near the Hilton, where prevailing winds had carried it, and used its mooring cable to tether it to Poly’s IBM-EMC airship. Then we returned them both by the simple expedient of having my phone fly them through the large species entrance on the far side of the Convention Center and pilot them back to the humanoid lobby. When my phone caught up with us at a pop-up Nathan’s food stand a hundred yards into the hall from the main humanoid-species entrance, Poly and I were enjoying hot dogs, French fries and cans of Diet Starbuzz.

  “Mission accomplished,” said my phone.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Did anybody see you?”

  “Just the woman you’d left sitting in the lotus position on top of the kiosk,” said my phone.

  “She was still there?” asked Poly.

  “It didn’t look like she’d moved,” said my phone.

  “Did she say anything?” I asked.

  “Ommmm,” it answered.

  My phone should do stand up.

  “Where to now?” asked Poly, wiping a spot of mustard off the corner of her mouth.

  “Back to our original plan, I think,” I said. “We should go back to the far corner and check out the cheaper booths with the startup companies.”

  “Great,” said Poly, “but I want to stop at the GalCon Systems booth first.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why GalCon Systems? Anything special you want to see there?”

  “A friend from college might be working there.”

  “Cool. Which way to their booth?”

  Poly pointed up and farther into the Convention Center. Many yards ahead, a giant banner with the GalCon Systems name and logo hung over what looked like one of the largest booths in the complex.

  “Got it,” I said. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  “It’s Lay on, MacDuff,” said Poly, “and damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

  “If you say so.”

  I wondered when there’d be some Poly-related holding and laying on this trip, but my partner seemed to be caught up in the excitement of GALTEX. She grabbed my arm and tugged me deeper into the Convention Center, toward the GalCon Systems banner. To our right was a huge booth for Verne Wells & Company, demonstrating scale models of their Nautilus-inspired custom submarines and Martian tripods. I didn’t have anywhere to put a full-sized version of either—those were aimed at oligarchs and nation-states—but thought I might pick up models of both as souvenirs. Poly pulled me along when I wanted to stop.

  I did my best to avoid further distractions. We walked past dozens of Terran and off-planet network equipment vendors, I.T. security firms, cell phone manufacturers, app developers, and Software-As-A-Service providers before we reached our destination. The company’s footprint took up an entire block on the show floor and trumpeted their products with professionally designed black and gold signs and banners.

  “Those are Steelers’ colors,” said Poly.

  “GalCon Systems’ headquarters is in Pittsburgh,” I said. “It makes sense.”

  “It took me a while, since I’m a Patriots fan.”

  “You care about sports ball?”

  “Just the Pats and the Red Sox,” said Poly. “I’m a Bostonian, after all.”

  I slowly shook my head and smiled.

  “You’re not a Yankees fan, are you?” asked Poly. “If you are, we may need to rethink our partnership.”

  “The confused guy who stuck a feather in his cap and called it some sort of pasta?” I said.

  “You passed,” said Poly, squeezing my hand and leading me forward.

  The GalCon Systems space was divided into dozens of smaller areas focusing on specific product lines. We walked past a section on adaptive congruent acoustics that made me think about R. C. Dunwoody’s daughter, Charli. She was working for GalCon Systems in that area and I wondered if she’d be at the show. Another small display featured congruent networking equipment, like the kind I maintained at the Georgia State House. Yet another had transformer hardware that didn’t change voltage—it changed telecommunications protocols when c
onnecting to systems based on alien networking standards. Most alien networks used binary ones and zeroes and some sort of packet switching, but Pyr to Pyr network protocols used really odd, non-deterministic algorithms and needed sophisticated transformations for any sort of TCP/IP interconnections.

  Finally we made it around to what I thought must be the booth’s main entrance. Half a dozen company representatives stood behind a counter made from some sort of black off-planet wood, edged with polished gold trim. They were handing out literature—paper brochures are still important at trade shows—and capturing prospective client information from their badges using hand-held chip readers that looked like small lightsabers.

  Every time a badge was swiped the lightsaber made an electronic “whoosh” sound. I suspected some of the customers were lining up just to hear the “whoosh,” then I saw the sign that noted there would be a random drawing for a GalCon Systems-branded lightsaber with a simulated, non-cutting blade every hour. Now I understood why the booth was so crowded.

  Two women and a man were standing behind and to one side of the representatives at the counter. All three were tall, with dark, kinky hair and almond-shaped eyes. They seemed familiar, somehow, and were leaning together. From a distance, it looked like they were having a conversation about something serious. Poly dropped my hand and ran towards the trio.

  “Nettie!” she shouted.

  “Poly!” said the taller of the two women.

  Defying Zeno’s dichotomy paradox, the distance between them was quickly reduced to zero. Poly and Nettie embraced and started conversing at high speed. I walked over to Poly and her friend, smiling at the man and the other woman and shrugging my shoulders sheepishly.

  “I’m Jack,” I said to the man, extending my hand. He was young—in his early twenties—and based on the resemblance between him and the two women he had to be their brother, or possibly a close cousin. My guess was promptly confirmed.

  “I’m A.J.,” said the man, shaking my hand. “That’s short for Anthony, Junior.”

  He smiled and introduced the woman standing next to him. She looked a couple of years older than A.J.

  “This is Elizabeth,” he said. “She’s my sister. It took Mom and Dad three tries to get it right.”

  The woman elbowed A.J. none too gently in the ribs and stepped past him to shake my hand.

  “I’m Lizzie,” she said. Her eyes sparkled. “Pay no attention to A.J. All our gene pool’s brain cells were used for the women in the family. There weren’t any left for my kid brother—just ask my Mom.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just smiled.

  “How do you know Poly?” asked A.J.

  “We’re partners.”

  “In Xenotech Support?” asked Lizzie, pointing at my shirt.

  I nodded.

  “Right,” I said. “We do tech support for alien technology.”

  “Cool,” said A.J. and Lizzie in unison.

  “The woman syncing up at a high baud rate with Poly is our older sister Jeanette,” said Lizzie.

  I had a thoughtful expression on my face—no, that was too generous—I was looking like my forehead had just abruptly intersected with a two-by-four. These three weren’t just random people working at the GalCon Systems booth, they were the son and daughters of Janet Yu, the Terran woman who’d independently discovered congruent technologies, founded the company, and directly led to Earth’s invitation to join the Galactic Free Trade Association.

  Dr. Yu was Einstein-level famous. Everybody’s seen the video of First Contact Day. Dr. Yu, her husband, Dr. Anthony Obi, and their three kids, ages six, eight and ten, are standing next to a Pyr, a Tigrammath and a Nicósn on a platform in Times Square when the aliens revealed their existence and announced our invitation to join GaFTA. It’s probably the most-watched clip on the Terran Galnet. Fifteen years later, the three kids, now in their twenties, were hard to mistake.

  “You’re…” I started to say.

  “Took him long enough,” said Lizzie.

  “I’d have expected Poly to pick a partner who’s faster on the uptake,” said A.J.

  “Hey!” I protested, and was about to continue when Poly finally realized I was there.

  “Jack,” she said, her arm still around her friend, “this is Nettie. We were roommates in college.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, taking Jeanette’s hand and giving her half a bow.

  “Look at that,” said Lizzie to her brother. “She gets a bow. All I got was a handshake.”

  I turned back to Lizzie, removed an imaginary chapeau, and gave her a full bow with my left leg back and my head going nearly to knee level. Then I took her hand, gently kissed it, and returned to a fully upright posture.

  “Charmed, m’lady,” I said.

  Lizzie beamed. Her brown face turned a shade darker and her voice turned mischievous.

  “I hope you’re sleeping with him,” she said to Poly. “He has nice manners.”

  “I’m working on it,” said Poly.

  It was my turn to blush.

  “Pleased to meet you, too, Jack,” said Nettie. “Glad to see Poly’s taste in men is improving.”

  “Hey!” said Poly. “You’re one to talk.”

  “This isn’t the time or place for that discussion,” said Nettie. “Let’s adjourn to one of the deal rooms—we need an outside opinion on something.”

  “Sure,” said Poly. “Is that okay with you, Jack?”

  “I’m with you,” I said. “It’s your show.”

  “See,” said Lizzie to her brother in a stage whisper, “that’s how to keep a girlfriend for more than a week at a time.”

  “Why would I want to?” answered A.J., earning another elbow in the ribs.

  I smiled at the exchange and wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t been an only child. Nettie escorted us deeper into the expansive GalCon Systems exhibit space and invited us into a fifteen-by-fifteen foot room made from prefabricated, soundproofed panels. Inside were a round table, eight chairs, and a fully-stocked bar with drinks and snacks on top of a credenza.

  “Have a seat,” said Nettie.

  “Can I get you anything?” asked Lizzie.

  “Dancing girls?” asked A.J.

  Lizzie ignored him.

  “Water would be great,” I said.

  “Same for me,” said Poly.

  “Chivas on the rocks,” said A.J.

  Lizzie brought five bottles of chilled water over to the table and distributed them. She left A.J.’s in the middle of the table, forcing him to reach for it. Then she went back to the bar and returned with a stack of napkins and a large metal bowl holding a spiny, green, barrel-shaped Pâkk puff-cactus the size and shape of a cylindrical Morton’s salt package.

  “Will you do the honors, please, Jack?” asked Lizzie.

  “Glad to,” I replied.

  I took the metal bowl from her and shook it back and forth vigorously until the puff cactus turned from a vibrant emerald green to a pale-looking, washed-out hue. Once properly stimulated, the hollow center of the puff-cactus started huffing out crunchy carbohydrate balls that tasted like popcorn flavored with garlic and chives.

  “Good stuff,” I remarked, thinking that I may want to visit the Pâkk worlds someday.

  “It’s delicious,” said Poly, snagging a few puff-balls from the bowl and putting them on her napkin.

  “Nothing but the best for GalCon Systems’ clients,” said A.J. expansively.

  Both sisters ignored him, so he got up, walked over to the bar credenza, opened a drawer, grabbed something, and returned to the table.

  “Here you go,” said A.J., handing us a pair of gold pens bearing the GalCon Systems name and logo. “These are for you, so you can remember that sometimes
I’m right around here.”

  I looked at my pen closely. It was a fine instrument, not a cheap tchotchke.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll remember you’re sometimes right when I write.”

  Poly thanked A.J. as well, while the Obi-Yu sisters theatrically rolled their eyes and tried not to laugh. I put my pen in my pants pocket and Poly stored hers away somewhere indetectable.

  “Poly’s told me you’re pretty good at solving mysteries,” said Nettie, getting us back on track. She paused to emphasize the importance of the situation and locked eyes with me. “We’ve got one.”

  “At least one,” said Lizzie.

  “Poly and I are a good problem-solving team,” I said, shrugging my shoulders to indicate solutions weren’t solely my department.

  “And pretty good at ‘borrowing’ GalCon Systems advertising blimps,” said A.J., sotto voce.

  Lizzie elbowed him in the ribs for the third time. He didn’t react. Maybe A.J. was wearing a pupa silk vest, too?

  “What’s the mystery?” asked Poly.

  “Or the mysteries?” I added.

  “Someone…” said Nettie.

  “…or some competitor,” said Lizzie.

  “…is stealing our new router designs,” said Nettie. “Then they’re modifying them so that network traffic is anonymized and pirated signals can’t be tracked.”

  “I thought those gray box routers popping up everywhere looked familiar,” I said, “and they were turning up with your latest features a lot faster than I’d expected.”

  “Right,” said Nettie. “It’s like they get our designs out in production before we do.”