Wanderers On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 6)

by E. M. Foner

  “You’re doing great,” Kelly encouraged Shaina. “I would have been in tears by now.”

  “I wish you’d picked a fight with the Dollnicks,” the small woman replied gloomily. “They’re bigger and louder, but they really can’t stand confrontations that don’t fit into their hierarchical world view. The Grenouthians have been in this racket for millions of years and they hold all of the cards. If they agree to a change, it’s because they know they’ll be getting a better deal.”

  “I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but you’re paying for my time, so I may as well give you my opinion,” the Thark spoke up unexpectedly. “I’ve worked as an arbitrator for over two hundred years now, and I’ve never seen a contract that, from a free market standpoint, wasn’t a better deal for one side than the other. Good contracts are like good trades, both sides get something they want more than what they are giving in return.”

  “I know,” Shaina admitted. “I just hate seeing the Grenouthians get what they want. They really did take advantage of her on the contract.”

  The Thark glanced at the door, reached in his pocket, and slid something across the triangular table to Kelly.

  “I’m not really supposed to do this, but that’s my sister’s holo-cube, she represents artists in contract negotiations. It’s quite a specialized field, especially when you consider the subsidiary rights for action figures, spin-offs and the like. Just tell her I sent you.”

  “Fifteen percent finder’s fee to the brother,” Bork subvoced to Kelly, as she picked up the holo-cube and deposited it in her purse.

  The door to the waiting room slid open and the Grenouthians entered, but this time there were only two of them, the producer and the network counsel. The interns, or bodyguards, or second-cousins of great-uncles, whoever the extra bunnies were, they remained outside.

  “Perhaps we can find the occasional live slot for a public service show,” the Grenouthian advocate said. “Given time differences and the on-demand nature of consumption, I’m sure you wouldn’t object to the exact scheduling.”

  “Just how occasional,” Shaina asked immediately.

  “Shall we say, twice a cycle?” the Grenouthian suggested. It translated to a little less frequently than once a month on the human calendar. Shaina looked to Kelly for her reaction.

  “I could live with that,” Kelly whispered to her negotiator. “Once a week was really too much anyway. Maybe I’ll go back to an interview format rather than the quiz thing.”

  “The ambassador is willing to accept twice a cycle, provided you guarantee the slot for a full season and give her complete creative control,” Shaina responded.

  The Grenouthian producer whispered to his counsel, and shot Kelly a glance from below his heavily lidded eyes.

  “So, in return for Mrs. McAllister forfeiting all financial interest in Species Wars and dropping the required product placements of Earth exports, we will remove her name from all publicity related to the show, and give her a bi-cycle public service slot,” the Grenouthian summarized.

  “No, in return for Mrs. McAllister forfeiting half of her interest in Species Wars and dropping all of the required product placements, you will remove her name from any material in any form associated with Species Wars, and provide a semi-cycle slot on the network, including a studio and production support,” Shaina countered.

  “Oh, you’re good,” Kelly whispered, as the Grenouthians put their heads together to consult. “I always mess up on that bi- versus semi- business. But I forgot to tell you that I heard from the EarthCent branding guru and she wants to stick with the product placements on Species Wars. She said that a bad reputation is better than no reputation at all.”

  “Got it,” Shaina replied. “Let’s see what they say, first.”

  The Grenouthian counsel looked up from his private confab with the producer. “I’m afraid that allowing the ambassador a continuing financial interest in a show that she is so wholeheartedly rejecting will be unacceptable to our own creative staff.”

  Bork leaned over to Kelly and said, “Tell Shaina to insist on using the same soundstage and equipment as Aisha, otherwise they might stick you with their school studio just to be nasty. The students break everything.”

  Kelly relayed the message to Shaina in a whisper, and the former Shuk barker nodded.

  “The ambassador will forfeit all financial consideration in return for a continuation of Earth’s product placements, and the stipulation that her show be produced in the same studio and using the same equipment as Let’s Make Friends.”

  The Grenouthian producer winked broadly at his counsel, who smoothed the sash over his shoulder in satisfaction.

  “I believe we have a deal,” he said.

  “Recorded,” the Thark confirmed.

  Sixteen

  Kelly looked around the living area to see if there was anything she had forgotten to do to prepare for guests. After the Species Wars fiasco, the ambassador had decided to go back to her brain trust for a fresh perspective. Even if nobody was going to watch her once-a-month public access show, she was determined to get it right, so she was pulling out the big guns. In addition to Blythe and Clive, she had added Srythlan to her invitation list. While the Verlock was not exactly a friend, he was the longest serving humanoid ambassador on the station, and an extremely thoughtful sentient who seemed sympathetic to Kelly’s views in diplomatic meetings.

  “Where’s Clive?” Kelly asked Blythe, who was the first to arrive.

  “He volunteered to take Jeeves on the Effterii and investigate the Helper AI,” Blythe replied. She released the twins from their double stroller, and they immediately went into skirmishing mode, hunting for Beowulf. The dog pretended to be asleep as they charged him, but he involuntarily thwacked the floor once with his tail, tipping off the toddlers that they’d been detected. The twins turned and fled squealing in opposite directions, and the chase was on.

  “At least they’ll all sleep well tonight,” Kelly commented. She couldn’t even imagine how many calories the giant dog was burning in his attempt to herd the twins together. “Dorothy offered to babysit the kids during our meeting, so I wonder where she is. Hey, leave Love-U alone,” she ordered sharply. Beowulf and the twins had momentarily joined forces to harass Kelly’s massaging recliner, which had started inching towards the wall on its stubby legs, a programmed reaction to avoid accidental harm.

  “Got you!” Dorothy shouted, coming out of ambush from the kitchen and seizing the boy as he rushed by in pursuit of, or perhaps fleeing from, Beowulf. Only the participants knew the rules of their game. “I’m taking this circus outside,” she declared, holding the little boy aloft while his legs continued to churn away, as if he was still on his own feet. “If Mist comes here, tell her we’re at the training grounds.”

  Beowulf took the interruption as an opportunity to catch his breath, giving the other twin a chance to latch onto his tail. The soon-to-be three-year-old soon found herself running to keep up, as the dog followed Dorothy down the ramp.

  “Here, help me bring over some of the chairs from the dining table,” Kelly said. “They’re super light, but Joe says they’re one hundred percent carbon fiber, even the caning, so they’re supposed to be strong. I invited the Vergallian ambassador and I’m afraid he’d collapse any of the stuffed furniture if he tried sitting on it.”

  “Srythlan?” Blythe asked. “Did I ever tell you that he offered to invest in InstaSitter back when we were putting together a battle fleet for Raider/Trader? I would have taken him up on it if we needed the money. I liked him, and he’s a nice change from all of the fast talkers you meet in business.”

  The two women rearranged the overstuffed furniture and interspersed carbon fiber chairs, forming a rough circle around the coffee table which was in front of the couch. Then Kelly led Blythe into the kitchen, and the two of them brought out the custom food trolley. It was freshly loaded with finger food from Pub Haggis, though as usual, there was nothing identifiably Scottish in the mix.
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  “What’s with the catered goodies?” Blythe asked. “Is Aisha on strike?”

  “It’s her Vergallian foundling,” Kelly explained. “Even with the daily show, Aisha used to insist on doing most of the cooking. But since she brought home Ailia, she’s finally run out of time for extras.”

  “I wonder if that’s why Paul has been coming around so frequently the last couple months,” Blythe said. “He usually has a beer or two with Clive, but he’s not desperate enough yet to babysit for us.”

  “He feels a little displaced,” Kelly acknowledged quietly. “I’m sure he thought they’d have a child of their own by this point, but who knows. Neither of them talks to me about it. Hey, while we still have some privacy, did you dig up anything new on the Helper AI, or should I hold off saying anything in my weekly report until Clive gets back?”

  “I had an interesting conversation with Herl about it just this morning,” Blythe replied. “Have you had the room swept recently?”

  “Woojin and a few trainees did it around an hour ago. He’s been training them in surveillance and countermeasures, as you know. He and Joe each took a team to the Shuk afterwards, and they are going to take turns trying to follow each other in the crowds.”

  “Herl said he tasked an analyst to look through their recent archives for reports of major labor-for-resources swaps,” Blythe continued. “It’s not something they would normally care about, so it took a while to figure out the parameters. The analyst only came up with one hit, but it was a big one. Around two hundred and fifty years ago, a long-forgotten community of Drazen settlers from their early days of interstellar exploration showed up at the home world.”

  “Two and a half centuries ago is in their recent archives?” Kelly asked.

  “They consider anything in the last millennia recent,” Blythe informed her. “These settlers that returned had set out from Drazen with the earliest version of jump technology, which was only good for a single shot. The settlers themselves never expected to see home again, but the idea was that in the future, when the technology was perfected, the home world would catch up with them.”

  “Wow, that’s a leap of faith!” Kelly marveled at the idea of traveling somewhere without a way home, hoping that in the distant future, home might come looking for you.

  “In any case, either the jump didn’t take them where they expected to go or the home world messed up the records, because when the round-trip technology became available and the Drazens went looking for those settlers, there wasn’t any sign of them where they were supposed to be,” Blythe summarized.

  “How long ago was all of this?” Kelly asked.

  “Hundreds of thousands of years,” Blythe replied. “I can’t keep the Drazen dating system straight, though we could ask Libby. In any case, wherever the settlers ended up, they found a world they could make work, though it was a tough go for a long while. Then they suffered some disaster, and they lost their colony ship and most of their technology. Imagine if all of your books were electronically stored and you couldn’t manufacture new batteries for the reading devices.”

  “Ugh,” Kelly replied, glancing at her bookshelves. “I don’t want to imagine it.”

  “They never forgot who they were or where they came from, but they had a whole world to tame, and their first priority for a long time was survival. When they eventually started climbing the technological ladder again, most of the original equipment had been lost or degraded so badly that it just wasn’t that much of an addition to what they learned for themselves.”

  “Alright, I follow you so far, but what does this have to do with the Helper AI?”

  “So a few centuries ago, just when the colonists had finally advanced to the point of building their own one-way jump ship to dispatch to the Drazen home world, somebody figures out that their sun is going bonkers. Solar flares had caused them all sorts of technological headaches since they got back into space, and the radiation was getting so bad that the colonists had to put all of their resources into hardening their infrastructure. They didn’t have anywhere near enough transport to evacuate the world, and they were seriously considering moving their whole civilization underground.”

  “They were ready to try a jump drive, and they hadn’t developed the communications technology to call for help?” Kelly asked.

  “Herl said their star was so noisy that it was a miracle they ever got local communications working,” Blythe explained. “But all of this is sort of aside from the point. When they were trying to figure out what to do, an enormous ship pops up in their system, and it turns out to be a hive AI, one mind with billions of robots. They make an offer the colonists can’t refuse. The robots will build a fleet of ships large enough to let the Drazens go wherever they want in exchange for mining rights to the entire system.”

  “So the colonists took them up on it,” Kelly concluded.

  “The AI set to work, using the plan the colonists had already prepared for a colony ship of their own, though they upgraded the jump-engine design to something more standard. In less than a hundred years, they built a large enough fleet for the entire population of the planet, something like two billion Drazens by that point, and enough elevators to get the people and their goods into orbit. Some of the Drazens elected to return to the home world, others took off for different parts of the galaxy, and none of them looked back.”

  “Why wasn’t this the biggest news in the galaxy?” Kelly demanded.

  “It was, for a while,” Blythe said. “That was before we were part of the galaxy, remember? And all of the focus was on the returning colonists and the culture they had largely created from scratch. As Herl pointed out, the Drazens joined the tunnel network not that long after those colonists set out, so the idea of helpful AI wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “Alright, but why didn’t Libby mention it?” Kelly asked with a frown. “I’m sure she made the connection immediately. Libby?”

  “You have guests,” the Stryx librarian replied. Kelly looked to the door of the ice harvester, and the Verlock ambassador loomed in the opening. He seemed to be hesitating over whether or not to enter, and was looking up at the roof of the hold, which could be retracted in part or in whole, giving access to Union Station’s hollow core.

  “Please come in, Ambassador,” Kelly called, moving to greet the Verlock and head him off if he changed his mind. “You’ve never been to our home, have you?”

  “It is…interesting,” Srythlan rumbled. “Did you get it cheap after driving the local ice harvesters out of business with the treaty renewal?”

  “No, my husband recovered it as scrap before we were married,” Kelly replied, blushing for no reason. “This entire hold was once used for his, uh, recycling business, but these days he runs a little campground, does some repair work, and, uh, stuff like that.”

  “He trains spies for us,” Blythe told the Verlock ambassador, who of course, would have received a full briefing from his own intelligence service before setting foot in Mac’s Bones. “How are you doing, Srythlan? I haven’t seen you since our spy show.”

  “I’m still a double agent for the humans,” the Verlock deadpanned, flashing the button pinned to the inside of the collar of his heavy overcoat. Despite their thick skin and tolerance for a much broader temperature range than any of the other humanoids, the Verlocks preferred it hot, and would often dress up like they were going on an arctic expedition when visiting other species. “A collector once offered me five hundred Stryx creds for this button, and I turned him down.”

  “You passed up a good deal, Srythlan,” Blythe admonished the bulky alien. “We gave out thousands of buttons at that show.”

  “Thousands!” the Verlock replied with a thundering laugh. “And how many collectors are there in the galaxy?”

  “Hmm, he has a point there,” Kelly said, slowly shuffling alongside the ambassador as she guided him to one of the carbon fiber chairs. “You’re a few minutes early, but we don’t stand on formality here, so don’
t feel you have to wait to eat something.”

  “Salt cod?” the ambassador asked hopefully.

  “A half-a-dozen boxes,” Kelly assured him. “If you don’t finish it today, please take it home. Nobody else can stand the stuff.”

  “Here, let me help you with that.” Gwendolyn had arrived quietly and shifted instantly into hospitality mode. She and Mist spent so much time at Kelly’s that she felt more like a host than a guest. The Gem ambassador removed the lid from a wooden box of salt cod for the Verlock and passed it over without sampling the contents. “Mist is here too,” Gwendolyn informed Kelly. “She spotted Dorothy outside chasing Beowulf and those darling little children, so she went to help.”

  “Hi, Gwen. Thanks for coming. Oh, I see Czeros and Bork. I better get the drinks.” Kelly retreated into the kitchen and pulled a couple of wine bottles from the rack. She put them on a tray with a decanter of Scotch, but for some reason, she couldn’t find any corkscrews. Had Lynx borrowed them all for one of her barter training sessions? By the time she found Joe’s old Swiss army knife that included a corkscrew attachment and returned to the living area, all of the guests had arrived and were engaged in conversation.

  “The Stryx can be very suspicious of other AI,” Srythlan was saying, in answer to a question from Blythe. Without tapping on something to artificially increase his cadence, the Verlock spoke so slowly that it was difficult to understand him. Kelly often recorded his words through her implant and then played the translation back at double or triple speed.

  “You have the best intelligence of any of the biologicals,” Blythe said, a plain statement of fact. “Do you see any danger in the Helper AI?”