by E. M. Foner
High Priest on Union Station
Book Three of the EarthCent Ambassador Series
E. M. Foner
[email protected]
Paradise Pond Press
One
“In conclusion, it is the view of Union Station Embassy that the growing acceptance of humanity on the regional galactic stage leaves us woefully understaffed to deal with the problems and opportunities that now present themselves on a daily basis, and I urgently request that EarthCent fund a new full-time position for a junior diplomat in our office and fill said position forthwith.”
Kelly smiled to herself as she wrapped up her weekly report for EarthCent and mentally removed “forthwith” from the list of words that she had always wanted to say out loud if the opportunity ever presented itself. Her warning about the increasing demand on the embassy was entirely true, and she imagined they could find ample work for several new employees.
Donna, her best friend and the manager of EarthCent’s embassy on Union Station, had already headed home for the weekend, so Kelly wasn’t surprised when she heard somebody calling from the outer office, “Hello? Is there anybody there?”
“I’m in here,” she sang out in return, rising from her display desk in preparation to greet the unseen visitor. Her mind flashed back to a pre-immersive spy movie she had watched with Joe a few weeks earlier, in which the spymaster had a cover job as the cultural attaché in one of the old national embassies. Uniformed soldiers, an elaborate system of iron gates and sliding doors, and a bespectacled receptionist who kept a loaded gun in the top drawer of her wooden desk protected the embassy. Kelly was doubtful of the historical accuracy.
An attractive young woman stuck her head in the doorway, giving Kelly a preview of thick dark hair and liquid black eyes. Even though she and Kelly could now see each other plainly, the girl still knocked, or rather, she said uncertainly, “Knock, knock?”
“Who’s there?” Kelly responded, assuming she would either draw a laugh or get a new joke to try on her seven-year-old daughter, but the young woman took Kelly’s reply seriously.
“I am Aisha Kapoor?” she replied, making her answer sound like a question.
“Kelly McAllister. I’m the ambassador,” Kelly identified herself as she went forward to shake hands. Aisha, who had finally built up the confidence to insinuate the rest of her body into the doorway, seemed to come to attention.
“Ambassador McAllister?” she replied, her voice going up an octave. “I’m so honored. I mean, I knew I would be meeting you eventually, well, quickly, of course. I mean, I always knew there was a chance that you would be the first person I would really meet on the station, but somehow I never thought…” she trailed off.
“Please, come right in,” Kelly encouraged her, leading Aisha to the chair next to her display desk that was most often occupied by Donna during their daily brainstorming sessions. “I have to be getting home pretty soon since it’s my turn to cook, but how can I help you?”
“Weren’t you expecting me?” Aisha asked with sudden trepidation. In response to Kelly’s blank look, she fished in her purse and drew out an official-looking document that bore a suspicious resemblance to a repurposed EarthCent inoculation certificate. “I have my transfer orders right here.”
Completely in the dark, Kelly accepted the sheet of paper and read it out loud.
“Congratulations Aisha Kapoor. You have successfully completed your EarthCent diplomacy orientation. Proceed to Union Station and report to Ambassador Kelly McAllister forthwith.” Forthwith?
“After I looked up that last word and found out what it meant, I threw my clothes in a bag and spent everything I had on a supercargo ticket for the first non-stop trader coming this way,” Aisha said. She rummaged around further in her bag and finally extracted a handwritten receipt for the fare. “I’ve never left Earth before so I don’t know the procedure, but I’m assuming EarthCent will reimburse me for travel expenses?”
Kelly felt an overwhelming wave of empathy for the exhausted young woman and her worthless receipt. Obviously, the EarthCent training course hadn’t changed much since Kelly joined the diplomatic corps twenty-two years earlier. The instructors never mentioned anything about the pay or reimbursements for out-of-pocket expenses because there was little of the former and none of the latter.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Kelly offered generously and accepted the receipt. Hopefully, Donna would have enough in petty cash to advance their new employee some walking around money until her first paycheck, without making the girl feel like she was accepting charity. “I have to admit that your arrival has caught me by surprise, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. In fact, I just filed my weekly report and requested that EarthCent send us help, uh, immediately.”
“Your weekly report? Oh, I still can’t believe this is real. I’ve listened to all of your declassified weekly reports, some of them multiple times. The instructors hold them up as the gold standard for consuls and ambassadors. You speak in such lovely, long sentences and use such interesting words. I’ve tried reading the transcripts out loud to myself, but I always run out of breath before the period!” Aisha cut herself off after this last observation, worried that the ambassador might interpret it the wrong way, but Kelly was still stuck on the first part of Aisha’s revelation.
“You listened to my weekly reports in the EarthCent diplomatic training course?” Kelly tried for an instant to recall everything she had said in almost ten years of filing reports, more than five hundred altogether, and gave up. She couldn’t even imagine what it made her sound like.
“You didn’t know?” Aisha asked in wonder. “It’s practically the whole course, or I should have said, your weekly reports are the whole practical part of the course. The rest of the training was a lot of alien etiquette stuff that most junior diplomats will never get a chance to use. I mean, there were some reports from other ambassadors and diplomats, mainly about wars and disasters, but none of them do a weekly summary like you. Even though I just got here, I feel like I’ve known Libby, Gryph and some of the friendly aliens for years,” Aisha practically gushed. “I must have saved an entire village in a previous life to be so lucky in this one.”
“You listened to my weekly—no wait, I said that already,” Kelly caught herself. She felt a little like a boxer who had just taken a rapid combination of blows to the head. “I didn’t think anybody listened to my weekly reports, other than Libby, and the Stryx aren’t officially part of EarthCent. And they play my reports as a good example?”
“Is this a test?” Aisha asked doubtfully. “How could you not know that your reports take up more than half of the diplomacy textbook? All of the students joke that you could buy your own space station with the royalties.”
“LIIBBBYYYYYY!” Kelly exploded, fists clenched, staring fiercely at the ceiling.
“Welcome to Union Station, Miss Kapoor. I hope you had a pleasant trip,” Libby’s voice came over the office speakers. “And is anything the matter, Ambassador?”
“Weren’t you listening?” Kelly demanded. “You know perfectly well what’s the matter. Aisha says that EarthCent has been using my weekly reports in the textbook on diplomacy for years and nobody ever told me!”
“You know I’ve always thought highly of your reports,” Libby replied calmly. “Of course, I don’t have any control over how the humans run EarthCent, but I can’t think of a better training tool.”
“It’s not that I’m not flattered, but it would have been polite for somebody to have mentioned it to me, even just once in passing,” Kelly griped. “And I’ve never seen a cen
tee in royalties!”
“Hmm,” Libby replied neutrally, an affectation she had recently adopted. The Stryx librarian’s speech patterns had become increasingly human over the last couple years, perhaps as a result of handling all of the scheduling calls for InstaSitter. “Let’s just have a look at, oops, here it is.”
Kelly’s display desk lit up with a densely printed document that looked like an ancient microfiche before magnification. Libby panned the image and zoomed in at the top, which read, “End User License Agreement for Diplomatic Implants, Version 3.098T6kf.” Next the focus panned dizzyingly towards the lower left, pages blurring by so quickly that Kelly grabbed the arms of her chair in reaction. Then a single paragraph, highlighted in red, snapped into focus.
All official correspondence and communications of EarthCent personnel become the sole property of EarthCent. This includes, but is not limited to, the weekly reports submitted by Acting Consul Frank Consul Frank Acting Ambassador Frank Ambassador McAllister of Union Station. Any use or rebroadcast of EarthCent diplomatic traffic without the express prior consent of EarthCent is strictly prohibited.
“I’m really beginning to hate the EULA,” Kelly grumbled. “And I don’t remember signing off on any version changes, either.”
“The original EULA included a waiver allowing it to be modified by EarthCent at any time without further notification. It is, of course, always available on file if you should ever want to read it,” Libby pointed out helpfully.
“Are you paying attention to all of this, Aisha?” Kelly asked her new recruit sourly.
“Libby? THE Libby? Am I allowed to talk to you too?” Aisha asked breathlessly.
“Of course, Miss Kapoor. I am available any time you have a question or just want to chat,” Libby replied.
“It’s like a dream,” Aisha said solemnly. “I feel like I should pinch myself to see if I’m really sleeping.”
“Oh, I’m being thoughtless,” Kelly exclaimed, feeling a surge of guilt that she had let her own concerns interfere with helping the tired girl to settle in. “You must be exhausted. Your first trip off of Earth, Zero-G travel, I’ll bet you haven’t slept in days.”
“It really wasn’t that bad,” Aisha protested, though the very mention of sleep drew a reflexive yawn reaction from the tired young woman. “But if you can tell me how to find the dormitory, maybe I should lie down for a little while.”
Dormitory? This really is the poor girl’s first assignment, Kelly realized. Was I ever that young and innocent?
“The, uh, we, it really is a small embassy,” Kelly said defensively, hoping to let the new arrival down gently. “You’ll be staying with my family for the time being, until you settle into work and find a place of your own.”
“With you? With your family?” Aisha asked, her eyes going wide. “I couldn’t intrude like that. I’m sure that whatever accommodations EarthCent provides for new employees will be more than enough for me. I’m not as helpless as I look.”
“Well, the thing is…” Kelly started, but she hesitated to tell the girl the truth about EarthCent’s lack of provision for employees. No, she couldn’t risk disillusioning Aisha and seeing her quit the diplomatic service for private industry before experiencing the rewarding side of the job. “The thing is that I insist,” Kelly concluded. “We have plenty of room, you can stay in the main, er, house, or in one of the, uh, cabins. My husband runs a sort of a space camp. It’s much nicer than it sounds.”
“Living with a family is the best way for humans to become acclimated to station life,” Libby chipped in. “Think of it as part of your training.”
“If the two of you say so, who am I to disagree,” Aisha replied cautiously, this time making a question into a tentative statement. “And I guess I am pretty tired after all,” she added, looking positively exhausted now that the thrill of meeting two of her diplomatic heroes had burned through her remaining supply of adrenaline.
“Let’s get going then. Where’s your bag?” Kelly asked.
“My bag!” Aisha exclaimed. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to go to the dormitory after all. A robot butler sent by EarthCent met me when the ship came in and said he was assigned to bring my things to my room. I wouldn’t have found my way here so easily if he hadn’t given me directions.”
“A robot butler?” Kelly asked, a dark cloud of suspicion forming rapidly in her mind. “Did this robot have a name?”
“Jeeves,” the girl replied. “That’s how I knew he was a butler.” Her eyes suddenly grew even larger and rounder in her head, and for an instant, she looked like a Hindi movie star in a love scene. “You don’t mean that Jeeves was THE Jeeves. I was still so dizzy from leaving Zero-G that I didn’t think. Oh, and I even insisted he take my last ten centees as a tip!”
“I think I know where Jeeves took your bag, and don’t worry about him being offended by a tip.” Kelly shook her head, marveling at how Jeeves had pulled strings to get EarthCent to leave her out of the loop about the new employee just for laughs.
The first Stryx to grow up with human children had developed into an unrepentant practical joker, and his pranks were becoming more complex with each new attempt. But how on earth had he reached inside of Kelly’s head and pulled out “forthwith?” Wait, maybe she had discussed her word list with Dring and the two of them were in cahoots. Kelly couldn’t help smiling to herself. Cahoots was another word she was just waiting for a chance to use in conversation.
“It’s all very confusing,” Aisha admitted softly, as Kelly led her back through the main office and out into the corridor. “Three months ago I was barely aware that EarthCent existed, and now I have an internship in one of the most prestigious embassies.”
“Were you recruited out of university?” Kelly asked. “I was only twenty years old when EarthCent contacted me out of the blue and offered me the job. You look a bit younger than that to me.”
Aisha’s olive complexion grew a little darker and she replied so quietly that Kelly had to strain to hear. “No, I never attended university. I was recruited after I took the entry exam for the new textile factory, or at least, I think that might have triggered the offer.”
“Well, your family must be very proud of you,” Kelly said, hoping to learn something about her new houseguest before introducing the girl at home.
“My family didn’t really approve.” Aisha spoke so low that Kelly had to rely on her implant for amplification. “But I told them I would take responsibility for my own dowry, so my younger sisters were all on my side. My parents are very traditional, but they don’t have much money, and with a house full of daughters urging them to let me go, they gave in.”
“How old are you, Aisha?” Kelly asked, suddenly wondering if EarthCent had gone into the foster parenting business.
“I am nineteen,” the girl replied in a more normal tone of voice. “I know. You are going to say that a girl my age shouldn’t need permission from her parents to take a job, but that’s the way we were raised. If I had simply run away from home, my family would have disowned me. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Then I’m glad your parents came around, and if you can’t find a top-notch husband without a dowry when you’re ready to get married, there’s something wrong with the men on Union Station,” Kelly told her.
“Thank you,” Aisha replied with a catch in her voice, and Kelly was sure that the girl was blinking back tears from her eyes.
“So let me fill you in on our living situation,” Kelly continued energetically as they entered the tube lift. “My husband rents one of the large bays on Union Station core for his business, which was originally a scrap yard. Then he got rid of most of the junk and ran a Raider/Trader barn for a year or two, but when the game programmers dropped all of the military nonsense, most of that business evaporated. These days it’s sort of a hobby shipyard for locals who do their own mechanical work, plus a campground for space gypsies. Joe rents berths and tools to make repairs and modifications, and he converted a string of o
ld gaming mock-ups into cabins, sort of an informal motel.”
“A cabin sounds very nice,” Aisha replied, trying to mask her disappointment. “Is it very expensive?”
“You’ll be staying in the house with us,” Kelly assured her as the door slid open. The two women emerged on the inner docking deck, a short walk from Mac’s Bones. “We live in a converted ship, really just the crew quarters, and there’s plenty of space. In fact, it feels kind of empty since Laurel got married and moved out after staying with us for almost six years. I’ll put you in her old room to start, but like I said, there’s plenty of room if you want to change.”
The moment the two women entered Mac’s Bones, they were assaulted by a pony-tailed whirlwind whose excitement prevented her from ever finishing a sentence as her thoughts raced ahead of her tongue.
“You’re Aisha… Jeeves said…My doll started school…Metoo likes you…Beowulf is sleeping…I really don’t need babysitters…Laurel’s room?”
“Yes, yes and yes,” Kelly replied to Dorothy, long accustomed to her daughter’s hyperkinetic outbursts. “Aisha, this is my daughter Dorothy and her friend Metoo.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” Aisha responded in her best diplomatic manner.
“It is an honor to welcome a new EarthCent employee,” Metoo replied. Although the little Stryx still followed Dorothy around like a puppy when his schedule allowed, his interactions with adults now reflected a maturity that Kelly suspected her daughter might never achieve.
“Come!” Dorothy commanded, taking hold of Aisha’s hand. “Jeeves put your bag in Laurel’s old room. And he paid me ten centees to show you where it is,” she added, proudly displaying the coin.
Two
Joe quickened his pace as the morning tour of Mac’s Bones took him past the abomination of a spaceship that Crick had the gall to refer to as a yacht. Unfortunately, Crick’s dog barked and ran out to greet him, tangling herself in his legs and bringing Joe to a halt. If it hadn’t been for Borgia, the maniacally friendly Golden Retriever who attempted to merge with every humanoid she met, the owner of Mac’s Bones could have avoided some of the worst trades he’d made in years.
