Alien Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 2)

by E. M. Foner

  Kelly’s bracelet turned a darkish red, perhaps expressing sleepy anger, while the Horten ambassador turned a brighter shade of the same color. The other Hortens slipped farther into the yellow palette.

  “Do you really mean to claim that EarthCent isn’t working towards establishing itself as the primary gameverse superpower?” the ambassador thundered at her.

  “Gameverse superpower?” Kelly shot back in disgust. “What’s that green stuff you guys are drinking out there? Why should anybody possibly care what happens in the gameverse?”

  “You tell ‘em, Ambassador,” Joe egged her on. Although supporting Raider/Trader had become his main business, there was something about the over-the-top seriousness with which everybody was treating the game that put his teeth on edge. Besides, it was fun watching Kelly get mad at somebody else for a change.

  The remaining Hortens all stood up and gathered in a little clump, not unlike a huddle. Joe poured a final glass of wine for his wife and himself to finish the bottle, and they sipped in silence while the Hortens attempted to come up with an answer to Kelly’s question. Finally, the huddle broke up, and the ambassador addressed Kelly again.

  “Either you’re playing some kind of deep game or you are truly ignorant of diplomacy,” Ortha stated flatly. “From our intelligence reports of your meetings with other species, you are capable of either.”

  “So why don’t you explain to me what’s so important about who shoots who in the gameverse, and then we’ll all be on the same page,” Kelly retorted.

  “Surely you understand that the Stryx will not allow any of the species using their tunnel network to openly engage in interstellar war with each other,” the ambassador explained. “So what could war in the gameverse be other than a proxy for the real thing?”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard in my twenty years of service,” Kelly exploded. “Were you planning on handing over your home world to a bunch of gamers if they win? Are you all taking bets on the outcome? Is anybody’s job at stake?”

  The skin color of the Hortens shaded towards purple, and Joe muttered, “Embarrassment?”

  “Apparently we misunderstood your intentions,” the ambassador mumbled, and cast a significant look at Kelly’s Horten-supplied bracelet. “Either that, or you are capable of deceiving our lie-detecting device, which my technicians assure me is not possible.”

  “Apology accepted,” Kelly stated archly. “I will take it on faith that you didn’t mean to deceive us either.”

  “Deceive you?” Ortha began making loud snapping noises, and the other Hortens joined in as well, their skin turning a cheerful brown. It took Kelly a while to figure out that they were laughing uncontrollably. “Hortens do not lie, Madam Ambassador. Even the slightest falsehood causes our skin to break out in a terrible rash. The chemical agent that permanently altered our genome this way nearly put an end to our species. Everybody seems to think we introduced biological weapons in a terrible civil war, but in fact, the opposite was true. It was a badly engineered cosmetic product that changed us into what we are, and the civil war was merely the logical outcome of our people losing the ability to lie to one another.”

  “Well, then. I think we’ve taken a major step forward tonight in interspecies understanding,” Kelly ventured. “Why don’t we plan on meeting again at a future date and finding out what we really have in common?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to continue tonight?” the ambassador inquired. “There are many details about the new game rules we would like to discuss with you.”

  “Oh, I’d love to stay,” Kelly replied. “But we really need to be getting home. My daughter wasn’t feeling well and the sitter is expecting us at any minute.”

  The Hortens all broke out in snapping laughter again, this time pointing at Kelly and slapping each other’s fingers down. Joe leaned over and said, “Uh, Kel? Check your bracelet.”

  It turned out that black was the color of lies. To the vast amusement of the Hortens, Kelly’s face turned fire engine red.

  Nineteen

  When the much-anticipated confrontation between battle fleets led by the humans and the Hortens did take place, it was a fiasco. Both sides had chosen to invest heavily in Brupt Destroyer Spheres due to their unequaled fire-power, so they found themselves all in the same literal boat. Their gameverse leaders had felt compelled to order the unprepared capital ships into battle, just in case the other side brought theirs.

  That both sides had expected the outcome did little to assuage the egos of the men crewing the titanic virtual ships. But the crews hadn’t had enough time to figure out what their vessels were capable of, much less how to operate the holographic controls that had been designed for the Brupt. It didn’t help matters that the Brupt had relied on group telepathy rather than comms for coordinating crew actions and for inter-ship communications. All Paul could do was to watch the disaster unfold on the main viewer.

  The sole bright spot for either side was the pink Thark Battle Cruiser, co-captained by Chastity and Tinka, and remotely crewed by thirty-two-hundred adolescent gamer girls from a dozen different species. It turned out that the Thark ship ran on a massively redundant control-by-consensus system, reflecting the highly egalitarian Thark warrior society of a distant past. In order to counteract the suicidal heroics and self-sacrificing tendencies of Thark officers, the control system was designed so that every crewmember could issue navigational and fire control commands, but the ship would only respond when the consensus agreed with the instructions of one of the co-captains.

  The Pink Death, as the ship quickly became known, moved jerkily through the gameverse battlespace, firing only on occasion, and accidentally running down many of the original two-player vessels that had accompanied the big ships. Since the girls had reached an early consensus that defensive shields and countermeasures were excellent ideas, none of the weapons carried by the small ships could harm them. With the Brupt crews on both sides unable to coordinate the firing of their weapons with target acquisition and command, the Pink Death would have carried the day for Earth, except for a small flaw in the recruitment process.

  It turned out that many of the girls who had bought into Chastity’s ship and who were crewing over Stryxnet from the comfort of their bedroom mock-ups, lived on Horten and its allied worlds. It hadn’t occurred to anybody to establish a loyalty test for crew membership, since the men self-segregated without being told. But girls from all over the galaxy, most of whom were between the ages of twelve and sixteen and weren’t allowed to buy into the male-officered ships, only had the one option.

  After much futile maneuvering around Brupt Destroyer Spheres to attain advantageous firing positions only to have their weapons systems report a consensus failure lockout, Chastity and Tinka decided that their time would be better spent practicing navigation with thousands of hands on the controls. So they declared victory, and easily reached a consensus to go off and play by themselves.

  On the bridge of the lead Brupt Destroyer Sphere in the Earth fleet, Blythe watched the Pink Death sail away from the battlespace and sighed. She had never been a huge fan of fighting herself, but it was a necessary part of the Raider/Trader game. The holographic projection of the Brupt bridge made her wonder if the long-since-exiled aliens knew of any colors other than black and red. Why Paul had refused to follow Chastity’s lead and redecorate was beyond her.

  “Joe certainly got this one right,” Paul commented to Dring, who had come along for the ride. “He said that even if the controls were simple it would take us months of real-time practice to learn how to fight with a ship this big, and years to really understand its capabilities in combat.”

  “Why didn’t you ask the Stryx for help?” Dring asked.

  “He wouldn’t,” Blythe answered for Paul. “I did, but Gryph said the game was too closely coupled with real-universe economics for them to show favoritism. Not that the Stryx get everything right. Jeeves predicted that neither side would have enough control over
the Brupt ships to actually fight them, but he also thought that the girls would destroy all of us just to make a point.”

  A holographic projection of a panting ensign appeared on the bridge. The poor kid had probably been running little circles for five minutes in his own mock-up, as a virtual reality of corridors, hatches and ramps rolled by around him.

  “Ensign Hart reporting from main engineering, Admiral. The chief engineer has made no progress on rerouting fire control to the bridge or integrating target acquisition systems with fire control. He says, no offense, Sir, that even if we removed you from the loop, there’s still a seven-minute delay getting a runner from the targeting section to the firing controls. By the time we fire, the target will have moved. The ship just wasn’t designed for non-telepaths.”

  “Tell him to keep trying, Ensign,” Paul answered. “We have another three hours in the gameverse so we may as well use them.”

  “The chief did say something about bringing homing pigeons next time, Admiral.”

  “You and the pigeons are dismissed, Ensign,” Paul barked, trying to hide his amusement under the gruffness of authority. At least his crew members were thinking creatively, but obviously, homing pigeons wouldn’t work in the gameverse. The only practical solution was to upgrade the virtual Destroyer Spheres with modern comms, but the game programmers weren’t selling them yet. If they had put all of the money into Thark Battle Cruisers, they would have dominated the battlespace, even with the annoying consensus controls.

  “So, do you believe this is the outcome the game programmers expected when they changed the rules?” Dring followed up on his earlier question.

  “That’s it, Dring!” Blythe exclaimed. She swiveled her chair around to face the friendly alien, since nothing of interest was happening on the main viewer anyway. The only real fighting was between the clouds of little pickets, which as in previous battles, were evenly matched. “We thought we were playing a game, but in reality, the game is playing with us! But what do the programmers have to gain by antagonizing the player base?”

  “There’s tens of millions in Trader gold sunk into these ships, and a lot of it was purchased on the exchange with real currency,” Paul added. “The way BlyChas structured the shares, most of our owners don’t have much at risk. But the guys who bought commissions won’t be too happy if they turn out to be officering ghost ships.”

  “We spread the ownership shares much thinner than necessary in order to keep the cost per-player low, just in case something like this happened,” Blythe explained to Dring. “And Paul, if it makes sense to buy new ships, we can always transfer the commissions. It would have minimal impact on our profits. Scrapping the fleet and starting over would actually be a great business proposition for us, but I still want to know why they tricked us into buying ships we couldn’t make use of in the first place.”

  “Maybe they’re just testing your commitment,” Dring suggested. “While they have a tremendous amount of data about how players conduct themselves in the game, they don’t have any way of knowing whether the whole thing is just a fad. The galaxy-wide adoption of a multi-player game using Stryxnet for the infrastructure is something nobody has seen before.”

  “I know a bit about the history of human gaming from my Dad,” Blythe ventured. “The massive multiplayer games usually build up users quickly, peak, and then go into decline, unless there are new releases that expand the gameverse. Dad had never heard of a major game that basically used the current state of the real universe as a model for the gameverse before, much less forcing players to spend most of their time in the game simply traveling from place to place to earn game currency by trading. He says that most of the Raider/Trader players don’t fit the usual gamer profile. A lot of the kids actually see it as a way to look around the galaxy and learn something about business. And then the huge demand for Trader gold means that the good players can make a sort of a living at it.”

  “Perhaps the game programmers are feeling their way, just like the players,” Dring suggested to Blythe, sounding rather amused by his own analysis.

  “Well, according to the InstaNavy shareholder records, the players are much younger than I would have guessed. That may be why they accepted Paul as a leader so easily. At eighteen, he’s right around the average age. In fact…”

  “Uh-oh,” Paul interrupted Blythe. “You might have been a bit hasty, what you said about Jeeves being wrong earlier.”

  Chastity and Tinka were back, and the girls had come to a consensus after all. They were shooting at everything, especially the Destroyer Spheres, which exploded with brilliant displays as the Thark weapons destabilized their fusion cores. The previous jerky movements and random weapons discharges from the Pink Death had been replaced by silky smooth turns and concentrated displays of lethality.

  The destruction of both fleets was sped along by the fact that the weapons crews on the Destroyer Spheres broke discipline and started firing blindly, in an attempt to get their money’s worth out of the ordnance before the girls rendered it moot.

  “Want to ask her to spare us for old time’s sake?” Paul suggested to Blythe.

  “How? Write a giant message in space? I’d rather get home early,” Blythe replied philosophically. “Besides, it makes good business sense. She’s saved us from having to convince our shareholders to abandon these ships and buy something new. It’s really pretty smart of her, now that I think about it.”

  “Too late now anyway,” Paul reported with a groan. “Our own crew is firing everything we’ve got, and if I’m reading this tactical display correctly, the Brupt ship that I thought Patches was running just launched most of their torpedoes in our direction.”

  “If the game programmers anticipated all of this with their rule changes, then they’re better at forecasting outcomes than I am,” Dring admitted. “So what happens now?”

  Paul made a half-hearted attempt to maneuver the giant spherical ship out of the path of the rapidly closing torpedoes, but there was no escape. The gameverse suddenly disappeared around them, leaving them sitting in a small mock-up with the ship’s controller flashing the message, “Game Over.”

  Twenty

  Kelly went by herself to meet her mother at the passenger liner dock and escort her to Mac’s Bones. Kelly’s mother talked about trivialities on the tube ride home, and despite all of her personal and professional progress in the years since they had last met, Kelly still felt like she had been caught trying to get away with something. Joe and Dorothy were waiting to meet them when they arrived.

  “Please call me Marge,” Kelly’s mother’s hastened to say to Joe before Kelly could introduce them. This immediately threw Kelly off balance, since last thing she knew her mother’s name was Deborah, but she let it slide rather than starting things on the wrong foot.

  “Joe McAllister, Marge.” Joe and Kelly’s mother shook hands, and then exchanged hugs. “I’m honored to meet you at last. I’ve been waiting five years to thank you for bringing up such a fine daughter.”

  “What a coincidence,” Kelly’s mother exclaimed. “I’ve been waiting five years to thank you for taking her off my hands. And now I can thank you for this scrumptious granddaughter as well.” Having established their common interest in Kelly and Dorothy as joint property, Joe and Marge each took one of Dorothy’s hands and strolled towards the picnic tables set up outside the ice harvester for the occasion.

  Hoping to soften the blow of her mother’s descent on paradise, Kelly had opted to invite Donna’s family and a few others to the welcoming meal. In a master stroke of strategic planning, Kelly convinced Jeeves to attend and to sit next to her mother, who insisted on having Dorothy on her other side, with Joe next to Dorothy.

  Kelly sat next to Donna and Stan across the table, along with Metoo, who liked to sit where he could see Dorothy. Donna’s girls, along with Tinka, Paul and Patches, took up the rest of the table, leaving a spot for Laurel at the end. Laurel had insisted on doing the cooking, which meant she was up and
down through the first half of the meal. Dring had been invited, but he claimed a prior commitment.

  All of Kelly’s fears of embarrassing stories about her childhood being recounted by her tone-deaf mother went for naught. Marge’s attention through the first part of the meal was captivated by Dorothy’s imaginative account of how she and Metoo had spent the day “esploring.” Kelly could tell from Joe’s occasional quizzical glances in her direction that she might have oversold the thesis that her mother was a ticking time bomb of anti-social behavior waiting to go off at the slightest provocation.

  As they finished eating, Dorothy got around to asking her grandmother the natural question about who her mommy was, which gave Marge a reason to run through the news about the rest of the family on Earth.

  “Your Aunt Lisa has been married for ages, and she has three little boys, only they aren’t so little anymore. In fact, the oldest one is just as tall as that handsome young man sitting at the end of the table,” Marge told Dorothy.

  “Paul!” Dorothy identified him proudly.

  “And your Uncle Peter has two girls with a boy in between. The younger girl is just about your age, and her name is Susan.”

  “I like Susan,” Dorothy announced. “I want her to come and visit me.”

  “Your grandpa Steve, my husband, is on a fishing vacation with Susan’s other grandpa, Harold. Do you have any fish on Union Station?”

  Dorothy looked uncertain, but across the table, Metoo raised a pincer excitedly as if he was back in kindergarten on a Parents Day.

  “Yes, Metoo?” Kelly’s mother asked observantly.

  “We have lots of fish from all over the galaxy,” the little Stryx reported. “Some of them are very nice people.”

  “Thank you, Metoo,” Marge continued politely. “Grandpa Steve should be finishing his fishing trip tomorrow, and then he’s going to go stay with Grandpa Harold in Buffalo until I get home.”