by E. M. Foner
“Could I get a copy?” Samuel asked, hoping he wasn’t crossing the line into getting his neck broken on the spot.
“Very funny,” she said, her thumb digging into his collarbone. “Something tells me that our ambassador foolishly prepped you for this interview, but I waited two hours for the effects to diminish, and now—”
“May I cut in?” the ambassador’s daughter requested, putting her hand on Ajalah’s shoulder. The girl and the woman stared at each other for several long seconds, and then Aabina tilted her head slightly towards the back of the ballroom. The Imperial Intelligence officer glanced in the direction indicated and took note of the handsome man dressed in black who was cleaning his fingernails with an ornamental dagger. She released Samuel.
“I look forward to meeting you again,” Ajalah said with an icy smile. “Both of you.”
“Ta,” Aabina said sweetly, but she kept her eyes on the older woman until another couple waltzed between them. “Scary, isn’t she?”
“Terrifying,” Samuel agreed. “You know her?”
“I sat next to Ajalah at dinner and spent the whole meal watching her hands out of the corner of my eye to see if she would try to poison me.”
“Why would your mother invite a woman like that to the embassy, much less throw her a party?”
“Imperial Intelligence is one of the balancing forces in the empire,” Aabina explained. “It’s better to welcome their operatives as guests than to have them skulking around undercover. I even have some relatives in the service.”
The song came to a close and the orchestra segued into a slower and more subdued piece, indicating that the evening was drawing to an end.
“When are you starting at my mom’s embassy?” Samuel asked.
“Tomorrow, I hope. It’s the strangest thing, but I don’t think that your girlfriend likes me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“After the Dollnick dumped all of the IDs on the floor, Marilla and I got into a conversation about the problems we could expect working for Humans. We went up to find our badges at the same time as Vivian, but mine was missing.”
“Did you ping Libby?”
“The station librarian? No, I just waited and chatted with your girlfriend until she had to leave for her job, and you know what? It turned out she was standing on my ID the whole time, as if she didn’t want me to work in the EarthCent embassy. Isn’t that funny?”
“I’m sorry,” Samuel said. “She has this idea in her head that I’m attracted to Vergallian girls.”
“Isn’t everybody?” Aabina replied without the slightest hint of self-consciousness.
“I’m hoping she’ll stop worrying when we’re officially engaged. Vivian originally wanted to get married on the Sunday after her eighteenth birthday, but for some reason she changed her mind. Now I’m supposed to make a formal proposal instead.”
“Are you waiting for something?”
“She wants me to do it on the last day that she’s seventeen. I don’t argue with her about stuff like that. The truth is, it doesn’t matter to me. I’d just as soon take her down to the Elvis chapel and get married right now.”
“You sure know how to put a damper on a romantic dance,” Aabina said, causing the young man to blush.
“I just hope that Drazen Intelligence doesn’t teach her to kill because I’d be a dead man if she could see me right now.”
“From what I know of Drazens, they’re probably fitting her with a prosthetic tentacle so she doesn’t feel left out.”
Three decks above the Vergallian embassy, in a theatrical shop on the Drazen deck, Vivian scrunched up her nose and repressed a shudder.
“It feels weird,” she complained to her newly assigned handler, “like I’m going to fall over backward.”
“That’s because you have it extended directly behind you. Try curling it up on your shoulders, like this.” The Drazen woman demonstrated by extending her own tentacle above her head, and then bringing it down so that a thick loop fell over each of her shoulders. “Just be careful not to get your neck in the middle or you could strangle yourself.”
Vivian concentrated on the control panel for the prosthetic tentacle which had been linked with her implant to appear on a heads-up display. There were over a hundred individual joints to manipulate and she ended up tugging on her own ponytail.
“Ouch!”
“Maybe the tentacle isn’t absolutely necessary,” her handler said. “Korg?”
The Drazen proprietor, who had been pretending to straighten a nearby display of back braces, dropped what he was doing and returned to his customers. “At your service, ladies.”
“The tentacle seems to be a bit much for her right now. Is there anything you can do for her hands?”
“I have just the thing,” Korg declared, leading the women over to a rack of odd-looking gloves with the fingers cut off. “A salesman convinced me to give these a try, even though they’re manufactured by Humans, and they’ve been selling like hot peppers to the five-fingered species who want to play our musical instruments.”
“We make these?” Vivian asked, accepting a pair of the gloves and slipping them on.
“On an open world owned by the Two Mountains consortium,” the shop owner confirmed. “Personally, I can’t imagine what it would feel like going through life with only one thumb on each hand, but it will probably take you a while to get used to them.”
“Hey,” Vivian said, her eyes lighting up as she gripped her left forearm with her right hand. “It actually works!”
“There’s a sensor that picks up the nerve impulse to the little finger next to the prosthetic thumb,” Korg explained. “I’ve been told that most humans lack the discipline to move their pinkies independently, but the musicians who come in seem to have no problem with it. Mind you that the prosthetic isn’t as strong as your natural thumb, and leverage is dependent on the tightness of the glove, but they’re very useful for operating Drazen equipment that requires six fingers.”
“We’ll take them,” the handler said. While the proprietor cashed them out, Vivian’s companion helped her remove the prosthetic tentacle rig and told her, “You can roll up a towel and stuff it in the back of your blouse or dress where it will look like a tentacle hump for the time being. We’ll come back and try again after you get used to having the right number of thumbs.”
Six
Marilla spent almost an hour sticking her head into various parked spaceships and calling “Hello?” before she concluded that there must have been some mistake about the starting time for her first official day of work at Mac’s Bones. Her shoulders sagged in disappointment and her skin began showing some dull blotches as she gave up and headed for the exit. At the last minute, she decided to risk being rude and ascended the shallow ramp of the converted ice harvester, where she knew that Samuel lived with his family.
“Come in,” Kelly welcomed the Horten girl. “Joe told me you were starting today and asked me to get you settled in, but I have to leave for work in a few minutes.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marilla said. “I got here early but I didn’t want to disturb anybody in your house. I’ve been looking for Mr. McAllister out in the parking area.”
“Joe, Paul, and Kevin all went out in the tug before I woke up. They must have taken the dogs with them or I would have gotten a report from Beowulf as soon as you entered the hold. Do you drink tea or coffee?”
“I couldn’t let you serve me,” the Horten girl said in horror. “I’m your husband’s employee!”
“We don’t have that rule,” Kelly said. “Libby? Can you estimate when Joe and the boys will be returning?”
“The Nova is in the core and making its final approach,” the station librarian replied. “The bay doors have already started opening.”
“Oh, I can’t get enough of watching this,” Kelly said, grabbing the surprised alien’s arm and pulling her towards the door. “You’ll want to see it too.”
Marilla followed
the ambassador back down the ramp of the ice harvester, and both of them craned their necks to watch as the bay doors opened to their fullest extent. The shimmering atmosphere retention field gave the approaching ship the appearance of a desert mirage. A jury-rigged tow rack holding six small ships in a grid was suspended below the tug as it settled into the hold, but the only sound was a warbling ‘Beep, beep, beep,” vaguely reminiscent of the back-up warning Joe had added to all of the heavy equipment in Mac’s Bones.
“Where’s that noise coming from?” Kelly asked, looking around. “Oh. There you are.”
Dorothy made one final ‘Beep’ sound to the delight of her baby before greeting the co-op student. “Hey, Marilla. Do any of those wrecks look familiar? Kevin said he was going out with my dad and Paul this morning to find some Horten ships to get you started.”
“They’re bringing in those six ships for me to work on?”
“Well, mom and I certainly aren’t going to fix them. We already have jobs.”
“That’s right,” Kelly said. “I have to get going. Our Vergallian co-op student is starting at the embassy today.” She turned to her daughter. “Give me some sugar.”
Dorothy dutifully held out the baby for her mother to kiss, and then the ambassador walked quickly to the exit, leaving the hold just as the tow-rack touched the deck. The rigid coupling holding the rack to the tug opened, and then the Nova lifted a little higher and maneuvered to its usual parking spot.
“Let’s go see what they brought,” Dorothy said. “Are those Horten numbers on the two pink ones?”
“Yes,” Marilla replied nervously. “Do you really think your father is going to expect me to restore those ships by myself? All I have experience with is cleaning up after customers and assembling Stryx controller interfaces.”
“Then you can learn on the job. You really put a bee in their bonnets with that rental talk. Paul has been trying to figure out what to do with all of the little ships for years. It wasn’t worth fixing them up, because traders only want ships with cargo capacity. He didn’t want to sell anything for scrap,” Dorothy continued in a lowered voice, “because they were all a gift from his wife. Your timing is great too, with the CoSHC conference coming up.”
“I think the pink ships with the numbers once were rentals or leases,” Marilla said. “I don’t recognize the models so they must be pretty obsolete.”
“What’s obsolete for Hortens is advanced technology for us. Watch out for the dogs. They look excited.”
Alexander skidded through a wide turn as he changed course towards the girls, and then, claws scratching at the deck, built up speed again as he bounded right at them. Beowulf lagged behind the younger dog but didn’t overshoot the turn as badly. Neither of the Cayl hounds showed any sign of slowing as they approached, and Marilla was sure she was about to be knocked on her back when Alexander leapt clear over her.
“Is he going to do that every time I—” the Horten girl began, but she was cut off by shrill whistling.
“Alexander! Come here!” Dorothy yelled, but the Cayl hound ignored her and instead began barking and snapping at a newly arrived Dollnick who was backed up against the chandlery counter.
The four-armed alien fended the hound off with a piece of equipment mounted on a tripod and remained surprisingly calm in the face of his attacker. Then Beowulf arrived, clamped his jaws around the loose skin on the back of Alexander’s neck, and began to slowly drag his son away.
“Sorry, sorry,” Kevin panted, sprinting into the scene thirty seconds behind Beowulf. “Alexander! Down!”
The younger Cayl hound finally stopped trying to claw his way forward, but he continued to snarl and bare his teeth at the Dollnick, who was whistling what sounded like a lullaby in an attempt to calm the situation.
“Sorry,” Kevin repeated once again when he was sure that Alexander wasn’t going to lunge at the stranger. “We have a new baby in the family and these Cayl hounds can be overly protective of their packs.”
“Perfectly understandable,” the Dollnick said. “He caught me by surprise, is all. Normally, I carry treats on this job, but I had nothing to offer as a bribe.”
“What job is that?”
“Property assessor,” the Dollnick said, producing a holographic cube that served as his business card and offering it to Kevin. “I’m Blure. I didn’t really expect to encounter any Cayl hounds on Union Station.”
“Could I ask what you’re doing here?”
“Surveying,” Blure replied, giving the tripod he still gripped in his lower set of arms a shake. “The public spaces on the station are fully documented, but my employer wanted to get some measurements of the privately leased spaces with access to the core. Are you the owner?”
“No, but he’ll be here in a minute,” Kevin said, placing a calming hand on Alexander’s head. “My father-in-law has leased this hold for over thirty years, but the owner is Gryph, of course.”
“And that’s why I’m here. I work for Prince Drume, who is currently the president of the Princely Council. They’re planning to bid on Union Station at the auction.”
“What auction?” Dorothy demanded, coming up behind the dogs with the baby. “Don’t tell me that the Dollnick princes believe the crazy rumor about Gryph selling Union Station.”
“I assure you that we are expecting an announcement of the auction date any day now. I’ve been working overtime to get my report in.”
“Well, you can ask a Stryx yourself,” Kevin said. “Jeeves is the one who warned me that our hound had you cornered, and here he comes now with my father-in-law and Paul.”
“Jeeves went out with you guys this morning?” Dorothy asked.
“Paul invited him to come along and identify the Horten ships. They look the same as the Drazen family craft from the outside, and both species copied the design from the Frunge.”
“Did not,” Marilla muttered under her breath.
“Any harm done?” Joe asked, coming up and offering the Dollnick his hand. “No pieces missing?”
“All part of the job,” the alien reassured him, producing another holographic cube to give to Joe. “Blure. I’d like permission to survey your hold.”
“Didn’t you check with Dollnick Intelligence? I’m sure they have more detailed plans than I do.”
“Oh, I got a floor plan from them that shows the layout of your training camp, but those espionage types couldn’t tell you the three most important factors in valuing real estate if their nests depended on it.”
“And what are those?” Joe asked.
“Location, location, location. See those bay doors?”
“Just came in through them.”
“Exactly. Most of the hold space on the core is reserved for the large shippers and passenger lines. There are only six-hundred and thirteen private leaseholds with exterior access on all of Union Station, and your facility is one of the nicer ones I’ve seen so far. Do you mind if I ask what you pay for rent?”
“I won’t take offense, if that’s what you mean.”
“And you won’t reply. I understand. It was just a shot in the dark.”
“Jeeves,” Dorothy addressed the young Stryx who floated up alongside Paul. “Tell this Dollnick that Gryph isn’t selling Union Station.”
“Gryph isn’t selling Union Station,” Jeeves repeated dutifully. “And if he does, I’ve been wasting a lot of time and creds working up the new Libbyland attraction.”
“Is that your home?” Blure asked the ambassador’s husband, pointing at the converted ice harvester with his tripod.
“Now that I look at it from here, it could use a little dressing up,” Joe admitted. “We just redid the shipping container that my daughter lives in so our place is looking a little scruffy by comparison.”
“You insist that Gryph isn’t selling the station, but I can’t help but notice that you’re moving out.”
“You mean the furniture and things? It’s not even all ours. We’re planning a multi-family tag sale
and some of our friends have been dropping off their things. The more stuff you list in the ad, the more people will show up.”
“If you say so,” the Dollnick whistled skeptically. “Do you mind if I confirm the interior dimensions and take a few notes about the lighting and such?”
“Knock yourself out,” Joe said. “Beowulf, you stick with Blure and make sure that Alexander doesn’t jump him from behind.”
The older Cayl hound, who had been planning on a snack and a nap, let out a long-suffering sigh as he fell in behind the Dollnick.
“Good morning, Marilla,” Jeeves greeted the girl. “I picked out the six ships from Paul’s collection that are the closest to what you’ve worked on at the Horten rental agency.”
“I really only cleaned them and plugged in new ship controllers,” Marilla protested.
“That’s more than most people ever do,” Paul said. “The two of you know each other?”
“Stryx Jeeves taught the educational LARP course at the Open University,” the Horten replied. “I took it with Samuel, Vivian, and—some Drazen.”
“And you passed with flying colors,” Jeeves said.
Marilla groaned at the terrible pun, which recalled her experience growing wings and suppressing her skin’s coloring response to emotional states.
“I’m helping Jeeves in Libbyland today but you can ping me if you need anything,” Paul said. “See everybody later.”
The little crowd broke up, with Kevin keeping a grip on Alexander’s ruff, and half leading, half dragging the hound into the chandlery. Dorothy went back to their container to feed the baby, and Marilla was left with Joe, who tried to hide his awkwardness at having an employee who wasn’t a family member.
“We’re really enthusiastic about your rental agency idea and we hope you can tell us more about it as we get these ships into shape,” he said to the Horten girl. “But the first thing is to get you introduced to everybody.”
“Was Paul serious about helping Jeeves?” Marilla asked. “What can a Human, I mean, anybody, do to help a Stryx?”