by E. M. Foner
Alien Night on Union Station
Copyright 2014 by E. M. Foner
[email protected]
Paradise Pond Press
Cover image mash-up from NASA images
One
“In conclusion, it is the view of Union Station Embassy that the rapid expansion of coeducational classes for human and Stryx children has not gone unnoticed by potentially aggressive species who oppose the galactic status quo, and that the suspected kinetic impact asteroid attack on Earth was—oh, Dorothy!” Kelly interrupted her weekly report for EarthCent to stare horrorstruck at the dripping white mess with a shock of red hair that teetered into her office.
“I’m a mummy too!” Dorothy proclaimed gleefully. “Now I say when to eat ice cream.”
“No, Dorothy Anne McAllister. It doesn’t work that way,” Kelly told her four-year-old daughter while struggling to maintain a look of stern parental disapproval. “Where’s Chastity? I’m never letting her babysit again!”
“Blythe said!” Dorothy objected fiercely, a magic formulation that carried the weight of law in her universe.
“Blythe said what?” Kelly asked with a sigh, knowing that Dorothy viewed Chastity’s older sister as more of an authority figure than a mere EarthCent ambassador, who just happened to be Dorothy’s mother.
“Blythe said she can make me a mummy! Chassy said is not the same thing, but I wanted.” The little girl looked pleadingly at her mother as the runny paste pooled at her feet and the long, white strips of paper began to peel and droop with her movements.
Kelly knelt in front of Dorothy and began removing the rest of the sodden strips of paper mache from her little body. Where did Donna’s girls ever find so much paper? Dorothy stood perfectly still once Kelly began the clean-up operation, but it took more than some wet bits of cellulose to dampen her inquisitive spirit.
“Why can’t I be a mummy? Metoo is four and nobody tells him nothing.”
“Nobody tells him anything,” Kelly corrected her. Then she tried again to explain the difference between human children and the little robots to her daughter, who related to the Stryx children as if they were just clever kids made of metal. “Metoo is the same age as you, but he remembers things from long before your Mummy was born. I meant, Mommy. And mummies and mommies are not the same thing. Blythe was making a joke about the way I speak.”
“Bad Blythe!” Dorothy said with a pout, but Kelly knew her daughter would soon forgive Blythe for misleading her, just as she had a dozen times before. Part of Dorothy’s admiration for Blythe came from the fact that Donna’s seventeen-year-old daughter was dating Paul, and Dorothy positively idolized her older stepbrother.
“Where is Chastity?” Kelly tried asking again. “You didn’t come all the way here by yourself.”
Dorothy pointed her newly freed arm at the doorway, indicating that the girls were outside. Kelly sprang for the door, which slid open to reveal an empty office. The part-time staff had already cleared out for the weekend, and the only sign of the girls was a bit of a mess on the floor near the kitchenette sink that the maintenance bot would take care of eventually.
“I’ll never understand how those girls ended up in the babysitting business,” Kelly exclaimed to herself, as Dorothy scampered happily around the office, leaving a trail of dried flecks of flour paste.
“Are you talking to yourself again or were you expecting an answer?” Libby inquired unannounced through Kelly’s implant. The Stryx were normally fastidious about respecting the protocols of communications, even though they had a complete disregard for the privacy of EarthCent employees and eavesdropped freely on their human friends. But when Kelly was out on maternity leave four years earlier, she had given the station librarian permission to speak to her without chiming first. The agreement for the diplomatic grade implants that came with Kelly’s ambassadorial position allowed the Stryx to monitor her closely in any case, so Libby wouldn’t interrupt if she was doing anything important.
“I meant it rhetorically, but I wouldn’t mind an answer,” Kelly replied out loud. She had cut way back on subvocing since becoming a wife and mother, and she figured it could only help Dorothy to hear English spoken, even when it was only one half of the conversation. “Did you see what those girls did to my little angel?”
“Of course,” Libby replied, shifting her voice to the room speakers. “I’m always monitoring what goes on in the embassy office. They originally planned to make her into an angel, but the wire they brought to form the wings wasn’t stiff enough, so they gave up and made her a mummy instead. I’m afraid Blythe took advantage of your daughter’s limited vocabulary, but it was all in good fun.”
“All in good fun? Babysitting isn’t supposed to be about fun. It’s supposed to be about safety!”
“Really? Then it is surprising that their InstaSitter business is doing so well,” Libby replied dryly. “Did you know that they pay me a percentage to let them use the Eemas system for bookings? Operating a babysitting service is practically the same as running a dating service, except the babysitter gets paid, of course.”
“If that’s all there is to it, I suppose you’ll be running an escort service next,” Kelly retorted. “That would really be popular, but you might get in trouble with some of the more established guilds.”
“InstaSitter is proving to be a fine idea for a business,” Libby continued, ignoring the sarcastic comment from the EarthCent ambassador. “It’s tremendously popular with many of the station species whose young require supervision. There’s already been a noticeable uptick in the restaurant and entertainment business in those sections, and Gryph predicts the knock-on benefits could eventually add several points to the station’s economic output. In fact, I’m betting it will lead to a baby boom among the cultures that had no tradition of hired babysitting.”
“But they’re such horrible babysitters,” Kelly protested. “When Dorothy was still in diapers, they used to take her out at night as a prop to increase their flower sales in front of the cafes!”
“And didn’t it help their profits?” Libby asked, apparently puzzled by Kelly’s complaint. “In any case, they’re too busy managing InstaSitter to take any of the babysitting assignments themselves, and most of the clients require non-human sitters.”
“Wait. Are you telling me that they only babysit for me as a favor? I thought at two creds an hour, I was giving them a chance to earn real money,” Kelly grumbled, as she pulled Dorothy onto her lap. The girl had completed her exploration of the office and the paste had all flecked off of her stain-resistant jumper by this point. Kelly acknowledged to herself grudgingly that no harm had been done and that Dorothy had probably learned a new vocabulary word she wouldn’t forget.
“The minimum rate charged by InstaSitter is four creds an hour, but of course, eighty percent of that goes to paying the sitters, and most of the rest goes to overhead. The girls are very focused on growing their brand rapidly, so they aren’t paying themselves salaries yet, but they’ve already turned down buyout offers that would make them…”
“I don’t want to know,” Kelly interrupted, putting her hands over her ears like a child. “Can we talk about my weekly report? I’m worried about a connection between Union Station and that suspected asteroid attack on Earth. Is there any data that wasn’t shared with the public?”
“Of course,” Libby replied. “As reported, it appears that an unknown party was able to redirect a city-sized rock from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to a course that would have intercepted Earth’s orbit in a little over a year. The asteroid contained enough iron content to be manipu
lated with magnetic projectors, and the residual magnetic polarization demonstrates beyond a doubt that this was an intentional act.”
“Right. All of that was reported. So what’s been held back?”
“EarthCent alerted the Stryx when the asteroid first appeared on the NEOD, or Near Earth Objects Detection system we provided to Earth after budgetary constraints had led your governments to abandon their own project. A Stryx science vessel that was sent to tow the asteroid back to its original position was tasked to first ascertain the asteroid’s mass and trajectory to a high degree of accuracy. Then it time-synced with the NEOD equipment in Earth orbit and projected the exact location that the asteroid would have entered Earth’s atmosphere.”
“And?” Kelly prompted impatiently, as Dorothy showed signs of becoming fidgety about something.
“It’s impossible to project the precise impact point on Earth’s surface, of course, since the atmospheric density is dependent on the local weather, which we can’t predict that far out in the future,” Libby continued apologetically. “Atmospheric conditions will also have a small affect how much of the asteroid’s crust would burn up on entry, though the analysis showed that the core would have survived without breaking up in any scenario.”
“It sounds to me like you’re talking about something on the same order as what finished off the dinosaurs,” Kelly speculated nervously.
“The kinetic energy released would have been suspiciously similar to that of what your scientists call the K-Pg extinction event,” Libby confirmed.
“Suspiciously? You mean somebody has done this before?” Kelly asked incredulously.
“It’s hard for us to attribute motivations to unknown actors, especially when they are likely to be biological agents. But due to the obvious nature of the attack and the unlikely choice of weapon, we believe somebody was trying to convey a message.”
“You mean a warning,” Kelly translated.
“Yes. And that brings us back to the impact location, since anybody going to such elaborate pains to send a warning would probably intend it for a specific audience.
“But I thought you just said that you couldn’t accurately determine where it would have hit,” Kelly objected.
“I said we couldn’t project the precise impact location,” Libby countered. “With an asteroid this size it hardly makes a difference in terms of the damage it would have done, and if it wasn’t so suspicious, we wouldn’t have bothered with all of the math.”
“I’m beginning to think you’ve been taking drama lessons from Jeeves,” Kelly interjected impatiently. “What country was it aimed at?”
“Oh, we can do a little better than that. While it’s always possible that whoever redirected the asteroid was just settling for hitting Earth, we’re working on the assumption that it was carefully aimed. And the target was…” Libby paused dramatically.
“Bubbalo,” Dorothy shouted proudly.
“Bubbalo?” Kelly asked, looking from her daughter to the ceiling, where her eyes always tended to drift when talking with Libby.
“Bubbalo,” Dorothy repeated, emphatically. “Libby teach’ed me.”
“Buffalo,” Libby corrected her gently.
“As in Buffalo, New York?” Kelly began to rise, before thinking better of it and depositing Dorothy on the floor. “You’re getting too big for me to carry, Sweetie.”
“Yes. We haven’t come up with any high probability matches for targets in Buffalo, although if our theory is correct, the targeted entity might be able to identify the threat if we publicly announced everything I just told you.”
“I’m not sure how wise that would be,” Kelly speculated, taking Dorothy’s little hand and leading her towards the corridor. “There’s not much point to panicking people into abandoning a city when the asteroid would have wiped out everybody on the planet, whoever it was aimed at. And you’ve already admitted that they might have just pointed it at Earth without doing all of the extra math.”
“That’s the consensus of EarthCent staff, which is why we limited the details in the public release. We’ve stepped up monitoring of Earth space for potential threats, and EarthCent has been funded to install the latest biological threat sensors.”
“Well, I have to get this munchkin home for our family-night meal. It took me forever to talk everybody into the idea, so it wouldn’t look good if I missed it. I’d like to discuss this more later, but please let me know immediately if you see any evidence to tie the asteroid attack to the Stryx school on Union Station.”
“Enjoy your family night,” Libby said. “Bye bye, Dorothy.”
“Bye, Aunty Libby,” Dorothy replied with a vague wave at the space behind her. She still had trouble grasping that Libby didn’t have to be in the same room to speak to her, and she assumed that Libby was a big version of Metoo who was always hiding in the somewhere.
Walking slowly to match her pace to Dorothy’s little steps, Kelly headed for the tube lift closest to the embassy offices. The reduced rate of progress gave her time to pay attention to the ceiling-high corridor display panels which she usually ignored. They were all showing an ad for InstaSitter, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the redheaded child shown from behind in the arms of a beatifically smiling Blythe was Dorothy. The rest of the walk home went by with a steaming Kelly on autopilot.
“Where is everybody?” Kelly called as she entered the crew module of the junked ice harvester that the family called home. In their first year of marriage, Joe had put a lot of effort into renovating the utilitarian quarters into something that more closely resembled the interior of a residential suite, but the decks and the bulkheads could only be disguised to a point. On the bright side, it was sized for a large crew to inhabit for extended periods in space, so there was plenty of room for everybody, even when they were all home at the same time. Which was rarely.
Dorothy pulled free from her mother’s hand at the sound of a heavy tail thwacking the deck and ran to greet Beowulf, who deigned to roll on his back for the little girl. The giant junkyard dog was well past his prime, and with the advent of Joe’s homebrewing hobby/business, had begun to sport a beer belly. But when he felt like standing up and growling, Beowulf could still intimidate anybody who wasn’t wearing an armored space suit.
“You can come out of hiding now,” Kelly said in a conversational tone to show that she wasn’t taken in for a minute by the prank. “That was very funny for a minute, pretending not to be home for our first family night, but it’s getting old.”
The only answer was the increased frequency of thumping produced by Beowulf’s tail as the little girl began to rub his belly with both hands. Kelly was about to tell Dorothy not to spoil the dog, when she noticed that Beowulf was also trying to catch her eye while pointing at something with his nose, his preferred method of communication. It only took Kelly a few seconds to figure out he was indicating the message board by the front door.
Kelly strained to decipher Joe’s lazy scrawl on the touch screen, but she finally worked out the message, “Emergency tow, took Paul to help, don’t wait up.” Below it, written in Laurel’s careful printing, “Called back for night shift. Pays double-time!!!” The last message was in Donna’s neat script, “Stopped in with Stan, nobody home. P.S. I think your scary watchdog was having a bad dream.”
Two
Joe watched out of the corner of his eye as Paul maneuvered the Nova alongside the alien vessel and began looking for a towing hitch. Paul had insisted on purchasing the Nova with part of the winnings from his championship prize in the Drazen gaming tourney a year earlier, just a few weeks after he turned seventeen. Joe might have refused the gift of a new tug from his foster son as being too generous, if not for the fact that Paul had been telling Joe for four years that he would buy a new ship for Mac’s Bones with his winnings.
The alien ship on the main viewing screen looked like nothing either of them had ever seen before, and Joe was beginning to wonder if it even had its own propulsion
system.
“It looks like a spherical terrarium with some sort of tree growing out from the center and a weird propeller sticking off the back into space. But what’s the propeller supposed to push against?” Paul asked.
“Maybe the propeller is on the front and it’s supposed to pull on something,” Joe replied for the sake of saying something, since he was just as much in the dark as Paul. “Try the ship-to-ship comm again. Maybe that guy Dring can tell us where to grapple.”
As if responding to the mention of Dring’s name, the comm came to life by itself, and this time an image of the alien pilot appeared on the main view screen as well. The pilot, who was holding onto a tree branch with his tail, made Joe think of a chubby little dinosaur from a children’s cartoon. It had a short snout with the blunt teeth of a herbivore, a pair of dark, saucer-sized eyes, and a crest of brilliant plumage on the top of its head. And it quickly proved itself to be a master of zero gravity yo-yo tricks.
“Ahoy there, Nova. Thank you for responding to my hail. I got your comm address from the ad on the beacon, but you never know how current those things are.”
“We’re happy to have the business,” Joe responded honestly. “Union Station core is so big that most ships either enter under their own power or just get close enough to let the Stryx pull them in with manipulator fields. Has your propulsion system failed?”
“Failed?” The little alien broke into a toothy smile. “No, but I’m not used to maneuvering in such a high traffic area and I thought I’d avail myself of your services. Are you equipped with magnetic grapples?”
“Yes. Just looking for a place to clamp on,” Paul answered.
“The end of the spindle is best, on the other side of the rotational mass,” Dring informed them.
“Will do,” Paul responded, and began maneuvering the tug towards what he had previously termed “the propeller on the back.”