Career Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 15)

by E. M. Foner

  “How many G’s could I take in that thing?” Samuel asked.

  His father flinched. “Never ask that question, Sam. Someday, somebody might want you to repeat the answer back and then take you at your word.”

  “I’m afraid that your brains are a bit looser in your heads than the other species,” Jeeves said apologetically. “Your people will probably be better adapted to acceleration a few hundred thousand years from now.”

  “Clearly all of this stuff is way beyond our capacity to repair,” Paul pointed out. “What does Baa want done, other than cleaning up all this mess? She could have hired the Gem for that.”

  “Humans are one of the few oxygen-breathing species on the station that doesn’t have a history with the Terragram mages,” Jeeves reminded him. “The Gem wouldn’t even talk to her. Playing gods to primitive cultures has its advantages, but you can’t expect to get good service from their descendents. I never would have hired Baa to enchant fashion accessories if it wasn’t for the fact that role-playing enthusiasts are more comfortable with mages than your average humanoid.”

  The Stryx floated over to a solid black slab that was mounted under what was apparently the main viewport on the bridge. There he waved his pincer through an intricate pattern that reminded Samuel of watching a Verlock mage casting spells in a LARP competition. A set of controls rose out of the seemingly solid surface, and Jeeves grasped a long cylinder and pulled it forward. A miniature hologram of Baa appeared.

  “I wanted you to see the ship before explaining what I need,” the holographic mage announced. “Basically, our standard configuration doesn’t provide enough storage and I’ve been meaning to do something about it forever.”

  “But she couldn’t find anybody interested in the job, at least not at the price she offered,” Jeeves interjected.

  “You know I’m at work,” Baa told Jeeves. “The longer this takes, the fewer handbags I’ll enchant today. Now, as I was saying,” she continued when the Stryx wisely chose not to respond, “I had in mind storage lockers all along the side bulkheads, and they’ll have to be welded so they don’t come loose if I’m taking evasive maneuvers.”

  “What size lockers?” Joe asked.

  “It’s not critical. See what you can come up with from the suppliers on the station. The Frunge make excellent storage units, but you better not mention who they’re for when you ask. If necessary, I’ll pay you to fabricate lockers from scratch, but I want the ability to configure each unit individually with add-in shelves, and they have to be able to stand up to the G’s.”

  “So basically you’re looking for more closet space,” Joe concluded.

  “More? I’m looking for ANY closet space. My ship wouldn’t be such a mess if I’d had a place to put things.”

  “Paul and I will check on what’s available and send you the options,” Joe said. “I’m worried about the bulkhead alloy, though. If it’s as advanced as the rest of your tech, I don’t think my welding rig will do it.”

  “I can change the chemistry of the inner surface as needed,” Baa said offhandedly. “It’s our version of memory metal.” She paused briefly before muttering, “Oops, I think I cursed that bag by mistake. Serves me right for trying to do eleven things at once.” The hologram winked out.

  “She’ll be the ruin of me yet,” Jeeves lamented, and moved towards the shaft connecting the bridge to the technical deck. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Interesting job,” Paul said, pulling out his laser rule to measure the areas Baa had indicated for the storage lockers. “Do you think we’ll find something off the shelf?”

  “If Baa’s control over this metal is what she claims, it might be fastest to just fabricate them in place,” Joe mused, thumping the bulkhead with the side of his fist. “I wonder if she’ll want locks, or if the ship’s security system would let us get away with magnetic seals and a mechanical back-up latch.”

  “You mean you’re taking the job?” Samuel asked.

  “Why not?” his father responded. “How many people can say they’ve ever been inside a Terragram ship, much less worked on one?”

  “But it’s…interior decoration!”

  Paul stopped playing his laser rule over the interior dimensions and turned to the younger man, a wry smile on his face. “Have the aliens at the Open University been giving you a hard time?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You wouldn’t remember when I was attending because you were just a little tyke, but I thought I was going to invent a counterweight system for small ships that would create a poor-man’s centrifuge so traders wouldn’t have to spend so much time in Zero-G.”

  “What happened?”

  “I built a prototype and it worked fine, but then I learned what engineering really is.”

  “You mean the aliens already had something better and they just don’t use it?”

  “I don’t doubt that, but what I meant is that engineering is the art of solving problems cost efficiently. My approach was fine in theory but I misunderstood the problem. Now that I think about it, I doubt I would have even started if it wasn’t for the fact that Blythe gets sick in Zero-G. Her whole family is like that.”

  “Vivian too, but it doesn’t sound that expensive.”

  “The last thing a small trader needs is to haul around a chunk of metal the same mass as the ship just to use as a counterweight, though I should really call it a countermass. But even if you get around the cost issue by splitting the ship itself into two masses cabled together to rotate around a common center-of-gravity underway, I missed the most important factor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lack of demand. Nobody forces people to travel space in small ships, it’s a self-selecting process. Most of the people who operate small trade ships actually like Zero-G, and exercising all the time gives them something to do on long voyages. Maybe it would have made sense for the luxury yacht market, but I wanted to do something for people like us.”

  “There’s nothing dishonest about building storage lockers, Sam,” his father put in. “A man should work to the best of his ability at whatever he can do. You’ve helped out here long enough to know that every job isn’t an engine overhaul, and given the chance, I’d rather fabricate something for a customer than change the filters in some alien technology that I’ll never understand.”

  “That’s just it,” Samuel said in frustration. “I’ve been studying math since I was a little kid in Libby’s school, and everybody is always telling me that I’m doing great for a human. But I asked Grude about his levels the other day, and I’d be lucky to catch up with him in twenty years, if I’m still capable of learning new stuff at that point.”

  “Who’s Grude?” Joe asked.

  “Dollnick student, he sat on Samuel’s committee for Flower’s refit,” Paul said.

  “His father is a baker but he’s always wanted to be a spaceship engineer and the Dollnick shipyards won’t give him an internship,” Samuel explained. “He wants it so bad that he’s planning on interning for the Sharf.”

  “And you don’t want it that bad?” Joe guessed. “If you’re interested in my opinion, the galaxy has too many spaceship engineers and not enough bakers.”

  “I don’t want to give up. I already dropped Vergallian Studies and I’ve been at the Open University almost three years. If I change majors again it will be like I’ve wasted all that time.”

  “You know that I never had any higher education, Sam,” his father said. “It’s all been on-the-job learning for me, and that’s what’s needed for this kind of work. I can follow Dollnick and Sharf blueprints, and even though I’ll never understand the theory behind any of the advanced tech, I’ve got a good enough feel for it to fine-tune the output, just like Beowulf can spot coolant leaks with his nose without understanding thermal fluidics.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Paul said. “Those Cayl hounds are pretty smart.”

  “I’d hire InstaSitters to watch that mage aroun
d the clock if I thought they’d do it,” Jeeves declared, floating back onto the bridge. “Imagine if that cursed bag-of-holing had found its way into our sponsorship launch.”

  “Holing?” Samuel asked.

  “Everything you put in falls through a hole and goes straight to the lost-and-found,” Jeeves explained. “The thing about curses is that it takes more power to reverse them than to just start from scratch.” A panel slid open on his casing and he pulled out an SBJ Fashions purse and extended it to Paul. “For Aisha. Just make sure she doesn’t use it in a LARP.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, accepting the bag and self-consciously draping it over his shoulder. “Samuel was just telling us that he’s getting frustrated with the Space Engineering program at the Open University.”

  “It’s just that sometimes I wish that my future would make itself clear for me, like in the visions that Kevin’s sister receives as a Prophet of Nabay,” Samuel said.

  “I’m working on it,” Jeeves muttered.

  Six

  “Did you stay up all night painting that guy on our wall?” Dorothy asked the Terragram mage. She moved closer to the recently designated bags-of-holding enchanting workbench for a better look. “No, I don’t see any brushstrokes. It reminds me more of Lynx’s printed photographs, only much bigger.”

  “It’s a mind image,” Baa informed the girl, quickly hiding the tissue with which she’d been dabbing her alien eyes. “He’s so imprinted on my memory that I can conjure up every last barb of his feathers.”

  “But how did you transfer it all to the wall?”

  “Superior intellect,” the mage replied, pushing an empty spray can labeled, ‘Telepath Actuated Base Coat,’ further under the workbench with her foot. “He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?”

  “He’s colorful,” Dorothy responded carefully. With his vertically slit pupils and too-long face, the figure on the wall looked even less human than Baa, though perhaps the fact he wasn’t wearing a shirt contributed to the disconnect. The feathers not only covered his arms but extended across his torso in intricate swirling patterns that made the girl feel slightly woozy. “I think I better sit down.”

  “He’s always had that impact on primitive species,” Baa said. “Together we would have been invincible.”

  “So that’s him?” Affie asked casually, removing the shawl she often wore in the corridors and coming over to examine the art. “I’ve seen depictions in fairytale books but they didn’t get the feather pattern right.”

  “He probably never visited Vergallian space, and the plumage patterns of our males are unique. Of course, I haven’t been able to look at another man since he came along.”

  “Oh, come on,” Dorothy said. “Everybody looks.”

  Baa shook her head sadly. “It doesn’t work that way with us. He stole my heart and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “I’ll bet the Humans have a support group you could join,” Affie suggested. “They have support groups for everything.”

  “Not for this,” the mage repeated. “All I can do is to wait.”

  “Time heals all wounds,” Dorothy offered hopefully. “When my first boyfriend eloped with a woman who my mom brought back from Earth, I thought I’d never get over it. Look at me now.”

  “It’s been over forty thousand of your years since he fanned his feathers at me the first time,” Baa told them. “Now I only see him when he’s out of funds.”

  “Is that why you’re so set on making money?” Affie asked. “I’ve always wondered about it since I’ve never seen you spend a cred.”

  “I have to be ready. He always knows where I am, and the best I can hope for is to hold onto him for a short while when he comes to me.”

  “That’s incredibly depressing,” Dorothy said.

  “Not to mention backwards,” Affie added. “How can such a powerful woman allow herself to be made into a slave by a display of feathers? If you were Vergallian—”

  “If I were a mere Vergallian I would throw myself out the nearest airlock,” Baa cut her off angrily. “Neither of you could ever understand what I’m feeling, so just drop it.” Discharges of static electricity danced around the tips of the feathers of the mage’s arms, and Affie retreated to where Dorothy had sat down, keeping herself between the mage and the human.

  Flazint arrived at that moment, an unstrung bow in one hand and a dagger at the belt of a Forest Ranger outfit. Her hair vines were woven through a color-coordinated trellis. When she saw the portrait of the Terragram mage on the wall, her eyes went wide. “That’s HIM.”

  “Baa’s boyfriend,” Dorothy confirmed.

  “No, I mean HIM. The Terragram mage who coerced millions of ancient Frunge to build the Great Temple. There are statues of him all over the necropolis of our homeworld.”

  Baa shrugged. “We weren’t together that long ago so I know nothing about it. Who else was in the pantheon?”

  “Nobody,” the Frunge girl said, unable to tear her eyes away from the lifelike image. “The legends say that he would block out the very sun when he was angry.”

  “That sounds so like him,” the mage said proudly. “Why get into a knife fight when you can bring a moon? And he always had a thing for monumental building projects.”

  “He’s coming here?” Flazint squeaked, backing away from the image.

  “Don’t worry, he loses interest in species as soon as they figure out multiplication tables. Besides, at the rate I’m making money, your children’s children will be in their dotage before he sets foot on Union Station.” Baa let out a long sigh.

  “Why are you all dressed up, Flaz?” Dorothy asked. “Going on a LARP date with Zach?”

  “Tzachan and I are not dating,” the Frunge girl replied sharply. “We haven’t even been officially introduced. He’s meeting us at the holo studio in his capacity as SBJ Fashion’s intellectual property attorney to make sure our new trademark for Baa’s Bags is honored.”

  “I’d like to see anybody not honor it,” the mage snorted. “Come along, girls. It’s time to earn your keep.”

  “Where are we going?” Dorothy asked.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Affie told her friend. “We have to hand out bags at the LARP event we’re sponsoring. I would have gotten out of it myself if I could have.”

  “This is discrimination against expectant mothers!”

  “You don’t even like role-playing,” Flazint reminded her. “After the sponsorship intro, we’re going up against a whole army of undead in some league play scenario that has ‘Blood’ in the title.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t care for that,” Dorothy admitted. “Don’t forget your bags-of-holding, and pick up plenty of loot.”

  The Vergallian and the Frunge followed Baa out of the office and Dorothy turned back to her table and began cutting out a pattern for a maternity frock. Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw something exiting from beneath the fume hood Flazint used when working with chemicals. The ambassador’s daughter did a double-take as Jeeves emerged.

  “Mum’s the word,” the Stryx said, floating rapidly for the door.

  “Wait a second. Were you spying on us? And if you were spying on us, why would you bother doing it in person rather than through the station security system or some multiverse trickery?”

  “I wasn’t intentionally spying on anybody,” Jeeves said reluctantly. “Flazint complained that the exhaust fan on her fume hood was noisy and I was fixing it when Baa returned from breakfast and started mooning over that mind image she created. I didn’t want to embarrass her any more than she was already embarrassing herself, and then you showed up and I lost the chance to slip out quietly.”

  “We should do something for her,” Dorothy said. “I don’t know, find her a new mage-guy or something.”

  “She wouldn’t even look at him,” the Stryx told his lead designer. “The situation is even more complicated than I initially realized, and nothing is simple with Terragram mages.” He moved towards the door, then h
alted and spun back to the girl. “Do you have a minute to talk about Samuel?”

  “Sam? But he never does anything wrong. Is he in trouble?”

  “He’s not happy with his studies.”

  “Really? Whenever the whole family eats together, he’s always talking about spaceship stuff with Dad, Paul and my husband. It’s like the women are having one conversation and the men are having a different conversation. I don’t even know why we sit at the same table.”

  “Samuel wants to contribute to humanity and he’s afraid he’ll never be able to do that in spaceship design. One unfortunate consequence of our bringing Earth onto the tunnel network before you developed your own faster-than-light travel is that the gap between your engineering base and that of the more advanced species won’t be surmounted in just a few generations.”

  “But he could make contributions using alien technology for humans in ways that nobody else has figured out,” Dorothy argued. “Just look at our heels and my wedding gown. I don’t know how the Verlock technology works, but nobody used it the way we’re using it in our products before I thought of it.”

  “I don’t believe that will be enough for him,” Jeeves said. “You know that Paul studied Space Engineering at the Open University for years, but other than a few of our Libbyland projects, he’s never really put the knowledge to work. Imagine if every new fashion you designed, somebody told you that the aliens have already done it a hundred times better and proved it to you.”

  Dorothy frowned. “Maybe they have and maybe they haven’t, but I’m going to keep trying. Otherwise everybody would just sit at home watching Vergallian dramas all day.”

  “I have my own ideas on what would be good for everybody, but you know that we avoid actively interfering with your development,” Jeeves said, crossing his pincer manipulators to cancel out the obvious lie. “As Samuel’s sister, what career do you think would suit him?”

  Dorothy was struck by the seriousness of the Stryx’s question and took longer than her usual half-a-second to respond.