by E. M. Foner
“That reminds me,” Kelly said. “Didn’t somebody say that Gryph was making good all the counterfeit creds that showed up on the station, and that he’d get it back from the Wanderers before they left?”
“Gryph took an IOU,” Clive told her. “Apparently it’s standard practice with the mobs.”
“Mommy! The guests are here,” Samuel shouted in excitement, jumping up from the game he was playing with Ailia and Banger. Sure enough, it looked like everybody had arrived at the same time, or perhaps there had been a bottleneck at the entrance of Mac’s Bones due to Srythlan’s bulk.
“I should get ready to greet the guests,” Kelly said. “Don’t anybody run off before the Grenouthian crew gets here.”
The EarthCent ambassador rose to her feet and went into the ice harvester to fetch a couple extra bottles of wine. After placing them on the drinks table, she went over to where her husband was adjusting the flames on the grill to heat it up for cooking.
“I’m just about ready,” he informed her. “Aisha and Laurel will start bringing things out any minute. Paul and Jeeves are hauling a cold keg up from my brew room. You might want to put out a couple of extra bottles for your diplomat friends, since they’re all going to be celebrating the departure of the mob.”
“I did that,” Kelly replied, not admitting she had just found out the Wanderers had finally wandered off. She stood for a minute, listening to the children playing some elaborate game they had learned on Aisha’s show. “Joe? Does Sammy sound like he’s congested to you? He might have caught a cold at school.”
“Turn off your implant,” Joe advised her with a broad grin. Kelly did so, and discovered that Samuel, Ailia and Banger were chattering away in Vergallian while they rearranged the colored sticks cast onto the deck in a series of intricate patterns.
“He speaks Vergallian?” Kelly squawked. “When did that happen?”
“Ailia’s been living with us for almost three months now, and you know how impatient Sam is about waiting for translations,” Joe said. “Makes me glad we put off getting him an implant, even though some people give them to kids as young as three these days.”
“He must get it from your side of the family,” Kelly observed. “I have trouble just remembering how to say ‘Check, please,’ in different languages.”
“Believe it or not, Banger is really the one teaching both of them,” Joe said in a low voice. “Ailia didn’t have a large vocabulary for a Vergallian when her nurse abandoned her. She must have been shunned by the high caste on the station, and her nurse couldn’t have been that friendly.”
“Where are Dorothy and Mist?” Kelly asked, looking around the area of Mac’s Bones that doubled as their picnic space.
“They’re fetching the banner they made up this morning. That rubberized paint is messy stuff, so I had them do it in my spray booth,” her husband explained. “It doesn’t take long to dry, they already had it rolled up when I saw it.”
“I wish they had asked before taking one of my new sheets,” Kelly said. “Well, at least it’s for a good cause.”
“The last of the Wanderer mob is gone,” Bork announced joyfully. The Drazen and Frunge ambassadors led the group of newly arrived guests. “May the gods grant I be retired or dead the next time they come around.”
“You almost make me feel guilty that the human Wanderers didn’t make any demands on us,” Kelly said.
“Wait until next time,” Czeros warned her. “When they get tired of living on that converted Dollnick colony ship of theirs, somebody will be on the hook for a nice, new habitat.”
“I still don’t understand why you all tolerate them,” Kelly said. “I get that the Wanderer mobs provide a sort of humane dumping ground for your outcasts, but surely there are cheaper alternatives.”
“Didn’t I read in one of the books you gave me that the most expensive building in many Earth towns was the prison?” Bork asked. “Surely it would have been cheaper to buy those inmates a one-way ticket to somewhere else.”
“They tried that too,” Kelly admitted. “Mainly with the young ones, though I guess I see your point, especially for those people who ended up in jail for not fitting into the place they found themselves.”
“Besides, we got off cheap,” Czeros informed her. “Did you hear what Gryph ended up giving them?”
“Gryph gave them a gift?” Kelly asked incredulously. “After they tried to flood the station with counterfeit creds?”
“The Stryx always give the Wanderers a gift for going away,” Bork explained. “Gryph upgraded the Stryx temporary tunneling ships this mob uses with an expanded envelope. That’s how they all left in a matter of hours instead of weeks.”
“Oh, I guess I can see the wisdom in that,” Kelly replied. “Please help yourselves to drinks, and Srythlan, I put out a large box of salt cod for you. I don’t think you need to worry about anybody else touching it.”
The ambassadors moved off to the folding tables set with appetizers, and Laurel’s husband, Patches, manned the temporary bar. The couple had moved back to Union Station after Laurel became pregnant because they both wanted their children to attend Libby’s experimental school when the time came.
“Quite a turnout,” Dring said when he reached Kelly. “Beowulf must be pleased to find he has so many friends.”
“It’s for a good cause,” Kelly replied. “Dring? One of the questions I never got to ask when we did the show is why the Stryx tolerate the Wanderers. I can’t figure it out, and Jeeves just makes jokes when I ask him.”
“You haven’t guessed?” Dring said. The chubby dinosaur hesitated for a moment, as if he was weighing the advantages of giving her hints rather than just supplying the answer.
“All I can come up with is that the Stryx feel sorry for the Zarents, since they’re the only species that is native to the mobs,” Kelly said.
“The Wanderers are a biological insurance policy,” Dring explained. “The Stryx like to hedge their bets, and from their standpoint, supporting the mobs is like wagering a few creds on a long-shot. Think of the Wanderer mobs as Noah’s arks floating around in space.”
“And they give us a place to send the naughty sentients who write graffiti in station corridors,” Jeeves added. For some reason Kelly couldn’t explain, the young Stryx’s habit of floating up silently and joining conversations struck her as intrusive, while Libby’s around-the-clock surveillance was generally comforting. “By the way, I ran into a pleasant-looking fellow at the casino last night who claimed to be your new employee.”
“Daniel Cohan?” Kelly asked in surprise. “My missing assistant consul? I’ve been waiting months for him to show up.”
Donna appeared suddenly at Kelly’s side and whispered urgently in her ear. “Kelly. I have to talk to you.”
Kelly excused herself from the receiving line with a smile and led her embassy manager and friend a short distance away. A close look at Donna’s face showed that she’d been crying, though she looked more excited than sad.
“What is it?” Kelly asked.
“Chastity, she’s gone,” Donna said, blinking back fresh tears.
“Disappeared?” Kelly said. “Have you asked Libby where she is?”
“She’s not missing, she ran off,” Donna explained. “Eloped with that Marcus fellow from the Wanderers.”
“Chastity ran away with the Wanderers?” Kelly exclaimed out loud. All of the guests in earshot turned in their direction.
“Not that,” Donna said. “She never came home last night, and when I checked her room this morning, there was a note on the bed. She and Marcus are on a passenger liner that left the station six hours ago. They’re going to have the ship’s captain marry them and honeymoon on Earth. Neither of them wanted the fuss of a wedding reception.”
“Congratulations!” Kelly said. “You and Stanley liked him well enough, didn’t you? I thought you felt that his lack of, er, his approach to, well, that he’d help balance out her tendency to work too much.”
“Do you want me to go tell her with you?” Kelly asked. “If we do it in front of her staff, how angry can she get?”
“Oh, you really are good at diplomacy,” Donna said. The two women cut through the drinks line and found that Blythe was still at the table with Chance and Thomas, though the other EarthCent Intelligence agents were all on their feet getting food or drinks.
“Hi, honey,” Donna said, though Kelly thought she sounded rather forced. “I have some good news for you.”
“About Chastity eloping with Marcus?” Blythe asked. “I wasn’t too happy about it at first, especially since she made such a fuss over my wedding. But Clive says that if Marcus chose Chastity over the Wanderers, he can’t be a bum at heart.”
“How did you know?” Donna asked. “She said in her note that I would have to tell you.”
“Please,” Blythe said dismissively. “I do have my own sources of intelligence, you know. Speaking of which, I see the Grenouthian crew just showed up, and I doubt they’re going to be willing to wait for everybody to eat.”
“We promised the monks, so we may as well get it over with,” Kelly agreed, looking a little self-conscious.
Everybody else spotted the Grenouthians at more or less the same time, so they reluctantly put down their glasses or swallowed whatever appetizer they were working on. The guests gathered in front of the large blue backdrop Joe and Paul had rigged along the bulkhead. Dorothy and Mist appeared, carrying their banner loosely rolled like a floppy carpet, since folding it too tightly was bad for the painted lettering.
“Metoo and I can hold that for you,” Jeeves offered, floating up to the girls and taking one end.
“Thank you, Uncle Jeeves,” Dorothy said. “We were going to pin it to the backdrop, but this will be more dramatic.” Metoo took the other end, and the two Stryx floated up behind the group of humans and aliens, who were arranging themselves in front of the hovering immersive cameras that preceded the bunnies.
“Alright, everybody to their places,” Kelly requested.
“Where’s the star?” the Grenouthian director from Aisha’s show asked sarcastically. He didn’t mind shooting a public service announcement as a favor, but the bunnies were one of the few species in the known galaxy that didn’t have their own version of dogs. “Hiding in his dressing room?”
Beowulf came trotting up with both Samuel and Ailia riding on his broad back, the boy sitting behind the Vergallian girl with his arms around her waist.
“Alright, alright,” the director said impatiently. “Just wait for your cue. Now who’s reading the text?”
“We’re taking turns,” Kelly replied. “Do you need to know the order for camera angles?”
“One lucky broadcast and she thinks she knows the business,” the bunny muttered under his breath. “No, the Huravian monks rented the full-resolution rig, so we can do the close-ups in post-production.”
“I go first,” Aisha told him, just in case.
“Alright, I don’t want to do this ten times,” the director shouted. “I’m going to count down from five, and when the blue lights on the immersive cameras go on, we’re shooting. Five, four, three, two, one…”
“Hi. You may recognize me as the host of Let’s Make Friends, Aisha McAllister. Today I’m here to introduce you to a friend of mine who went away for a while and came back very different.”
Laurel stepped forward and picked up the narrative. “I was also friends with the old Beowulf before he went away, so imagine my surprise when I recognized him in a young Huravian hound on the travel deck of a Stryx station.”
“If Beowulf hadn’t sniffed me out hiding in the wreckage twenty years ago, I wouldn’t be here today,” Paul said.
“But some Huravian reincarnations aren’t as lucky as Beowulf, because they never find their families again,” Kelly added.
“And that’s why, when you see a dog with a begging bowl…” Dorothy continued, holding up Beowulf’s Huravian keepsake, with the emblem of a dog gazing up at the stars.
“Don’t just pass by without stopping,” Joe concluded his daughter’s sentence.
“Let the hound give you a good sniff,” Bork said. “Their noses are even better than ours.”
The director pointed at Beowulf, and the giant hound trotted out to pose in front of the group with a big doggy smile, the two children perched on his back.
“AND GIVE A DOG A BONE!” everybody cried together, as the Stryx unfurled the banner.
“That’s a take,” the Grenouthian director declared. “Nothing like working with professionals.”
“Don’t any of you want to stay for food?” Kelly asked the Grenouthian crew, who had already turned the camera floaters around and were headed for the exit.
“Time is creds,” the director replied. Ignoring everybody else, he added, “See you tomorrow, Aisha.”
“I thought that went well,” Bork said modestly, basking in the glow of his speaking part. “I was a bit worried about Paul and Joe, since they haven’t been on camera before, but it’s easier with a group of people.”
“Food will be out in two minutes,” Laurel called, as everybody began migrating back towards the tables. “Joe will be grilling for non-vegetarians.”
“Can we come down now, Dorothy?” Metoo asked this question from where he floated up against the backdrop with Jeeves.
“Of course,” Dorothy replied. “Why do you even—Daddy!”
Joe’s head jerked around, searching for a threat. “What’s wrong, Dot?”
“Look what Beowulf did to our banner,” Dorothy said, pointing to the sheet that Jeeves and Metoo were still suspending between them. The ONE in BONE was obliterated by a paw print, and above it was crudely printed, E-A-R.
“GIVE A DOG A BEAR?” Kelly read.
Beowulf shot the ambassador a look of irritation, and balancing on three legs, lifted his paint-covered forepaw to cup his ear. He repeated the motion twice before they caught on.
“Charades?” Kelly asked.
“Sounds like, ear?” Joe guessed immediately. “Oh, you meant beer. Come on, boy. I thought you could spell better than that.”
“What are we going to do, Joe?” Kelly asked. “You know the Grenouthians won’t want to come back.”
“They can fix it in post-production with everything else,” Joe replied. “Besides, it’s kind of funny when you think about it.”
Beowulf lowered himself to the deck for the children to climb off, and then he stopped Samuel with his massive head.
“But I was sure that’s how it’s spelled,” the five-year-old protested to the giant dog. “You should have asked somebody old enough to drink beer.”
The dog looked at the young boy skeptically, but decided to let him off the hook. Besides, he really could eat a bear, so the banner worked either way. For the time being, he’d just start with bumping into people’s elbows and seeing what fell off their plates.
Wanderers on Union Station is getting a sequel. The Wanderers have just moved on from Union Station and Kelly is ready to take her first vacation in fifteen years. Unfortunately, the rules on paid vacation for EarthCent employees have changed for the worse, retroactively. Book Seven of EarthCent Ambassador series, Vacation on Union Station, is due out at the beginning of October, 2015, and is available for pre-order on Amazon. If you’re looking for something to read while you’re waiting, the author hosts a list of links to free Kindle historical science fiction and new Kindle SciFi series with a free first book on the IFITBREAKS.COM website.
About the Author
E. M. Foner lives in Northampton, MA with an imaginary German Shepherd who’s been trained to bite bankers. The author welcomes reader comments at [email protected].
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E. M. Foner, Wanderers On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 6)
