Empire Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 18)

by E. M. Foner

  “Is that what the locked door in the new office is?” Dorothy asked. “A third bathroom that you’re keeping in reserve?”

  “That information is on a need-to-know basis,” the young Stryx replied.

  “So why don’t you expand distribution beyond the tunnel network stations?” Kevin asked. “You could open boutiques—”

  “Too expensive,” Jeeves cut him off. “SBJ Fashions hasn’t achieved the production scale that would justify investing in our own stores on stations, much less on tunnel network worlds. Now, where’s this miracle Gem fabric that Dorothy claims is going to change the galaxy?”

  “I already packed it away, but I’ll get it out,” Flazint said, abandoning Tzachan with his forearms wrapped in metallic yarn. “Let me see. I put it in the exotic fabrics box, and it’s either on the mulebot or—right here,” she concluded, lifting the lid off the only bin remaining on her workbench.

  Jeeves floated over and took the black sash in his pincer. “Interesting,” he said, and the lights on his casing began flashing in a rhythmic pattern. “The nanobots are fully charged, but the programming is protected by the same encryption the Gem military used for their doomsday weapons.”

  “Oh,” Dorothy said in disappointment. “So we’ll have to wait for Gwendolyn and Myst to arrive and ask—”

  “Cracked it,” Jeeves declared. “Was anybody timing me?”

  “Are you serious? Can you make it change colors?”

  “Is that what Libby told you it does?” Jeeves began rotating his pincer, spinning the sash like a lasso, and then tossed it to Dorothy.

  “It’s still black,” she said, catching the mass of silky fabric. “Does it take the nanobots time to—are you doing sleight-of-pincer again? Where did this T-shirt come from?”

  “Do you mean the nanobots can be programmed to reconfigure the fabric?” Flazint asked. “That changes everything. It could be the most popular cloth in history!”

  “I almost forgot,” Jeeves said, and extended his pincer to touch the T-shirt, which abruptly turned white. “So, why do you think the Gem only used this nanofabric in luxury goods rather than for all of their clothes?”

  “To maintain exclusivity,” Dorothy said immediately.

  “Does anybody else care to guess?”

  “Because after you sell somebody a fully reprogrammable garment they never need to buy another,” Flazint suggested.

  “That’s a good point for all of you to remember, but it’s not the reason the Gem treasured this material.”

  “It must be expensive to make,” Stick ventured.

  “But nanobots are mass-produced by other nanobots in nanobot factories,” Kevin said. “I know that the Farling doctor uses medical nanobots that he buys from the Gem, but I thought the main cost was in the programming.”

  “You’re both right,” Jeeves said. “General purpose nanobots are inexpensive to construct in nanobot factories after you get the sunk costs out of the way, but in this particular case, the combination of properties the fabric needs to embody requires expensive feedstocks. You could run that T-shirt through an atomizer and sell the raw elements for over a hundred creds, and that’s before they’re processed into the molecules required for nanobot construction.”

  “So how much can I buy?” Dorothy asked.

  “With your money or mine?”

  “For work.”

  “None, unless you come up with a business model where we can sell dresses for five thousand creds, or convince the Gem to provide the fabric at a loss.”

  “How about if they recover the technology and then reduce the features?” Dorothy pleaded. “Like, just a chameleon version without the shape-shifting?”

  “It’s also proof against most projectiles and thermally stable,” Jeeves told her.

  “You mean it maintains the same temperature?”

  “Until the nanobots run out of juice. I’m saying this in front of witnesses just so there won’t be any misunderstandings. You are forbidden to purchase Gem nanofabric for SBJ Fashions without my prior approval. Now finish up moving what you can and I’ll have the maintenance bots take care of the furniture and equipment. Attendance at the company lunch is mandatory, so I’ll see you at noon on Universal Human Time in Pub Haggis.”

  “That only gives us a half-hour to finish up,” Kevin said. “What are you doing, Dorothy?”

  “You heard him,” she replied as Jeeves floated out the exit. “He’s sending maintenance bots to move the furniture. Put those patterns back in the drawers. I was only emptying them out to save weight.”

  “That gives me an idea,” Baa said. She yanked down the curtain she had insisted on hanging to keep her spell-casting private and threw it over her cluttered workbench. A look of concentration came over her face, the lights in the design room dimmed momentarily, and then her bench had been replaced by a giant cabinet.

  “Really?” Flazint asked. “Is an illusion going to fool a bot?”

  “The maintenance bots have difficulty discriminating between platinum necklaces and chains folded out of the foil wrappers from sticks of chewing gum,” the mage said dismissively. “I’m done here, so I’ll see you all at the restaurant.”

  “Wait,” Stick said, putting on his most charming smile. “Can you do the same for Affie’s stuff? I was going to just throw it all in this bin and let her arrange it in the new design room when she gets the chance, but you know how artists are.”

  “I know how sales managers are too, especially the kind that buys discount enchanted LARPing weapons from a Verlock hack, even though he works with the most powerful mage on the station.”

  “I’ll bring the stuff to you to have it re-enchanted,” Stick offered. “And there are some other players in my raid party who have bought weapons from the Verlock. I’ll persuade them to do the same.”

  “I might be interested if you invited me to come along on your next raid,” Baa insinuated.

  “But you always—all right,” he conceded, recognizing that the Terragram was in no mood to be lectured over her in-game conduct. “Just try to leave some of the treasure for the rest of us, and no reviving our party members as zombie slaves.”

  “We’ll see,” Baa said. She turned her attention to Affie’s workbench, which was easily the messiest corner of the design room, and wiggled her fingers while chanting something in an untranslatable tongue. There was a theatrical puff of smoke, and the sculptor’s collection of tools and materials were transformed into a concert grand piano. “I needed to choose something with the appropriate weight or the bots will get confused,” the mage explained on her way to the exit.

  “I’m going to go finish cleaning out the sales office,” Stick said. “Keep the floating bin. I’ll see you guys at the restaurant.”

  “If the maintenance bots are going to do all the heavy lifting, aren’t we finished here?” Kevin asked.

  “You could untie Tzachan and take him to unload the mulebot at the new office,” Dorothy said. “I’ll just finish stuffing everything else back into drawers.”

  “He is NOT tied up,” Flazint said, pulling the finished skein of metallic yarn off her boyfriend’s forearms and twisting it into a hank. “You can go with him and I’ll help Dorothy,” she told Tzachan. “Some of us who keep our workplaces organized don’t have any packing left to do.”

  Less than a half an hour later, the couples reunited at Pub Haggis, and to Dorothy’s surprise, the Hadad sisters arrived with Jeeves.

  “I asked Ian to give us a few minutes to get the business part of this meeting out of the way before taking your orders,” Jeeves began. “Starting tomorrow, we’ll be working out of our new offices, and my expectation is that the increased overhead will be met with an even larger increase in productivity. Unfortunately, you’ll have to settle into the new space without adult supervision.”

  “Where will the two of you be?” Dorothy asked the Hadads, intentionally not including Jeeves in the adult group.

  “I took a leave of absence to he
lp my husband with the Human Empire trade show,” Shaina replied.

  “And our sentient resources officer informed me that I have five weeks of vacation to use by the end of the cycle or it goes away,” Brinda said.

  “Aren’t you our sentient resources officer?” Stick asked.

  “That’s why I thought I’d better do what I say,” the younger Hadad sister replied. “Besides, Walter is going to be working overtime for the foreseeable future, and I’ve got a growing child and a lonely Cayl hound at home.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” Stick said. “I’ll make sure nobody goofs off.”

  “Who put you in charge?” Dorothy demanded.

  The Vergallian slid his plastic business card across the table. “What does that say?”

  “SBJ Fashions. Dietro. Sales Manager.”

  “Does anybody else have a card with ‘manager’ on it?”

  “Children, children,” Baa chided them. “There’s no need to fight with each other over who will be in charge when that responsibility obviously falls to me. I’ll go over your daily goals with you each morning and correct your behavior as needed.”

  Dorothy and Stick turned to the three owners and asked simultaneously, “You’re leaving HER in charge?”

  “I graciously acceded to the request of my partners to fill in for them as long as required,” Baa answered for them.

  “Partners?” Flazint squeaked.

  “Baa insisted on an equity share when her enchanted handbags became our leading product line,” Jeeves said. “That was over a year ago, and I’m sure you’ll all agree that it hasn’t gone to her head.”

  “She does work three times as many hours as the rest of us, but that’s because she doesn’t need sleep,” Dorothy said grudgingly. “I guess we all know our jobs by now anyway.”

  “Which brings us to our booth at the tradeshow,” Jeeves said. “All of the attention right now is on the political implications of a Human Empire, but from the perspective of SBJ Fashions, it’s an opportunity to make inroads while everybody else is focused on the headlines. Stick will be responsible for building a male customer list with our Shadow Dancer product, Dorothy and Flazint, you’ll be pushing women’s fashions and looking for new retail relationships, and Baa will handle the LARPing line.”

  “You want all four of us to work the booth together?” Dorothy asked. “The office will be empty during the tradeshow.”

  “It won’t hurt the business a bit for all of you to take a week off from thinking up new ways to spend my money and try to make some for a change. Affie should be available a few hours here and there to help, but between contract-queening for the Alts and filling in for the Vergallian ambassador as required, I wouldn’t count on her too heavily. If you have too much time on your hands, you can always get started prototyping formalwear for men.”

  “I don’t know anything about making men’s suits,” Flazint protested.

  “But you know plenty about zippers and magnetic sealing strips,” Jeeves pointed out. “That’s at least half of the battle. I’ll be away the next three weeks on Stryx business, so try not to bankrupt me. And don’t stint on the bespoke swag bags, EarthCent is paying for your time.”

  “What bespoke swag bags?” Baa asked. “I’m not enchanting throwaways for a hundred thousand trade-show attendees even if Gryph gives me free access to the station power grid.”

  “We only need the special bags for the alien observers,” Shaina said. “We don’t even know how many are attending yet, but Daniel thinks it won’t be more than a couple of dozen.”

  “So you want me to hand-embroider Empire@Empire on them?” Dorothy asked.

  “And the names of the observers, so they don’t steal each other’s swag. I already checked with Libby and she can provide you with templates so you don’t have to look up all the alien characters.”

  Six

  “What’s wrong with that alien?” a little boy asked, pointing at a Horten whose skin was bright blue.

  “Don’t point,” the boy’s mother scolded, pushing down her son’s hand. “He’s probably having a bad makeup day.”

  “You’re not that far from the truth,” Samuel told them. “The Hortens accidentally altered the DNA of their entire species with a badly engineered cosmetic product back before they joined the tunnel network, and as a result, their skin changes color with their emotions. One time my friend Marilla turned bright blue and got stuck that way until I embarrassed her so much that her blush response triggered again and cleared it.”

  “You’re friends with an alien?” the teenage daughter of the family asked.

  “Sure. I must have more alien friends than human friends.” Seeing the shocked reaction of the parents, Samuel hastened to add, “My mother is the EarthCent ambassador so I grew up seeing aliens all of the time.”

  “And you went to school with robots?” the boy asked excitedly.

  “With young Stryx who inhabit robot bodies for the sake of interacting with the other species. Our station librarian runs an experimental school for children, and the offspring of Stryx from all over the galaxy attend.”

  “We’ve already registered the children in a school on the human deck,” the father said. “I suppose it was interesting for a diplomat’s son to attend classes with aliens and artificial intelligence, but it’s not for us. The main reason we decided to move to Union Station is we want the children to spend more time around their own kind, especially now that Jenna is old enough to start dating.”

  “You always embarrass me!” the teenage daughter exclaimed, turning bright red.

  “Look, now Jenna’s a Horten,” the son said, pointing at his sister.

  “What did I just tell you about pointing,” the mother scolded him, again pushing his hand down.

  It seemed to Samuel that the family had played this exact scene three times already during the short orientation tour, but as a graduate of Libby’s school, he felt duty-bound to give recruiting one more try.

  “There aren’t any aliens attending the experimental school, Mr. Johnson. Just humans and young Stryx. We had a Gem for a while when my sister was going, but she’s in stasis now.”

  “Your sister is in stasis? Does she have an incurable disease?” the father asked.

  “My husband is a plain-spoken man,” the mother said apologetically. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “My sister is fine. It’s her Gem friend who’s been in stasis for over a decade, though they’re in the process of waking her up now. You probably know that the Gem started cloning boys to restore their species, and Myst decided to sleep until they had a few males for her to choose from.”

  “That’s, uh, very nice to know,” the mother said, and her teenage daughter blushed even brighter than she had before, “and your Shuk is very, er, cosmopolitan, but is there a shopping area where we might see more humans? Not that there’s anything wrong with aliens,” she concluded in a rush.

  “Oh, I just thought that you’d want to see the areas of Union Station where all the oxygen-breathing species come together,” the ambassador’s son said. “Let’s just hop back in the lift tube and I’ll show you around the human deck. Since our numbers have been increasing, there’s a whole corridor of shops and boutiques extending from the Little Apple towards the embassy.”

  “Little Apple?” the boy asked. “Is that like a fruit store?”

  “My mom told me it’s named after a famous city on Earth, or maybe it was a state,” Samuel replied, ushering the family into the lift tube.

  “It’s a city-state now,” the father told his son. “That’s where your mother and I caught the space elevator up to orbit when we left Earth before you were born.”

  “Little Apple,” Samuel instructed the lift tube, and then asked the father, “So did you leave Earth on an alien contract?”

  “Yes, but we never saw them,” the man said. “I put in fifteen years doing repairs on an ice harvesting fleet owned by the Grenouthians, but the ships were all operated
by humans. Our only complaint was the lack of a social life for the children. My wife home-schooled them with the help of their teacher bots, and the habitat was spun up so that we weighed almost the same as on Earth on the residential deck. But the population was only a few thousand, and families with children didn’t stay long.”

  “Except us,” the teenage girl groused.

  “Here we are,” Samuel said as the lift tube door slid open. “While the Little Apple is officially open around the clock, the food stalls mainly run on Universal Human Time, which means we’re between breakfast and lunch right now. The pizza places are just starting to warm up their ovens. I’ll show you the shops and boutiques in the corridor first if that sounds good.”

  “Yes,” the mother and daughter said simultaneously. The boy rolled his eyes and dropped back with his father, and the ambassador’s son found himself primarily addressing the two women.

  “All of these shops are leased directly from the Stryx, but on some of the alien decks that have been occupied much, much longer than ours, the majority of the properties are sublet from families whose roots on the station go way back. The Stryx don’t sell station real estate outright, but once somebody leases a space, the Stryx are inclined to let it stay in the family as long as the payments are made on time.”

  “Inclined?” the father asked, proving that he was paying attention after all.

  “Well, there may be something about it in the lease agreement, but those contracts are so long that everybody signs them without reading the details. Besides, the Stryx always include a clause saying they can make unilateral changes. My dad leases a large space right on the station core that used to be a junkyard, and I grew up in a scrapped ice-harvester crew module.”

  “Oh, it’s a wedding boutique,” the mother said, stopping to look at the elegant gowns in the display window. “I can just imagine how beautiful you would be in that one, Jenna.”

  The teenager turned red again, and Samuel began to wonder if she really did have some Horten blood in her. Then a Drazen girl came out of the boutique and motioned with her tentacle.