Space Living (EarthCent Universe Book 4)

by E. M. Foner

  “She’s got a point, Sam,” Vivian said, clearly impressed by Flower’s pitch. “I know you don’t want to rush into any decisions before our Cayl mentor arrives, but creating a little separation between the Human Empire and the Stryx might finally give us some legitimacy in the eyes of the other species.”

  “We haven’t even established a budget for rent yet,” Samuel protested.

  “It’s free,” Flower told them.

  “We’ll take it,” Vivian said.

  Samuel groaned. “Can we talk in one of the offices for a minute, Viv?”

  “I’ll open the secret passage and you can inspect the suite at the same time,” Flower offered. “Julie? Could you get the cookies out of the oven?”

  “I’m not sure that ambushing Samuel with your custom-built headquarters was the right move,” Julie subvoced as she followed her nose into the kitchen. “He may only be a year older than me, and Vivian’s actually younger, but they both have experience working for the aliens, and they aren’t going to appreciate being pushed around.”

  “I thought that Humans liked surprises. Besides, I’ve examined all of their options, and establishing the headquarters on board is really in the Human Empire’s best interest.”

  “I’m just saying they might have preferred to work that out for themselves. And I suppose giving them a rent-free headquarters isn’t in your best interest?”

  “There’s such a thing as a mutual benefit, you know, and the advantage goes to the first mover in most of these situations. Carpe diem.”

  “Why do I think I’ve heard that before?” Julie asked.

  “Because it’s one of the few Earth epigrams worth repeating—Seize the day. It’s up there with ‘Caveat emptor’ and ‘Primum non nocere.’”

  “What’s that last one mean?”

  “First do no harm. M793qK says that Human doctors take it about as seriously as Captain Kirk did the Prime Directive, whatever that means.”

  Julie found an oven mitt and removed the tray of cookies. “How do I turn off the oven?”

  “I did it already, and I vented the hot air to accentuate the aroma,” Flower said. “The cookies should be cooled enough to put on a plate by now. Do you think I should charge a nominal rent to make Samuel comfortable?”

  “I doubt this is really about the money,” Julie said, locating a spatula and sliding the cookies onto a decorative plate with the distinctive Human Empire branding in gold. “Well, for the apartment maybe, but these offices are on a different scale. It’s just that you can be a bit overwhelming at times.” She headed back out into the lobby and almost dropped the plate when she saw a group of strangers seated in the waiting area.

  “Bring those over here,” ordered a man with a white beard who appeared to be the elder of the group. “This is what I call service.”

  “Who are you?” Julie asked.

  “Refugees,” a middle-aged woman with platinum-colored hair replied. “Are you in charge here?”

  “I was just showing the place to prospective tenants for Flower,” Julie said, going around to the old man. Instead of taking one cookie, he relieved her of the entire plate. “What are you all doing here?”

  “We came to seek asylum from the Human Empire,” a different woman said. “Do you have any literature?”

  “There’s a library down the corridor.”

  “I meant promotional literature, a prospectus, full-color brochures showing the life we can expect if we join your empire.”

  “It’s not my empire. I already told you that I’m playing real estate agent this morning. And if any of that stuff you’re asking for exists, I’ve never seen it.”

  “Who are these people?” Vivian asked, reappearing in the reception area with a reluctant looking Samuel in tow. Judging by his face, she’d won the argument, at least for the time being.

  “We’re refugees from the Miklat,” the old man said, a few cookie crumbs escaping his lips. “Is there anything to drink? I prefer milk with cookies, but I’ll take mineral water or soda if that’s all you have available.”

  “We’ve come to hear what kind of package you can offer,” the woman with the platinum hair added. “We don’t need to see all of the details right now, but we wanted to be first in line for when you start processing applications.”

  “I’m afraid there’s been some sort of mistake,” Samuel said. “The Human Empire is just getting off the ground and we’re the only official staff. Besides, we’re here on our honeymoon.”

  “Your empire looks pretty established to me,” the old man said, holding up the plate with the Human Empire branding. Julie couldn’t help wondering where the cookies had all vanished so quickly, but then she noticed each of the Wanderers was now in possession of a small stack. “Any outfit that can afford an office like this is obviously in the money. You know,” he added craftily, “a one-time grant for refugees would get you positive press coverage.”

  “We aren’t accepting asylum claims at this time,” Vivian said, stepping up next to Samuel. “It’s just the two of us and we haven’t even moved into our temporary headquarters yet.”

  The Wanderers all went silent while they concentrated on stuffing their faces with cookies. Through some mysterious process, this must have led to a consensus, because they all rose and formed up behind the old man.

  “I’m Ronald, the senior human storyteller from the Miklat,” he introduced himself formally. “I can see at a glance that the two of you are newlyweds and very much in love, so I’ll give you a week to get your act together on our asylum application. We’ll be back.” With that, he turned and led the other Wanderers out to the corridor.

  “How did they even know we were here?” Samuel demanded. “Did you tell them, Flower?”

  “They asked for you by name,” the Dollnick AI said. “My standing policy when anybody inquires after the location of a person living on board is to supply the information unless you’ve specifically requested privacy. You are listed in the Galactic Free Press directory as the point of contact for the Human Empire. I thought it was better that they find you here than approach you in the corridor. Didn’t the waiting area work out well?”

  “Has anybody else been looking for us by name?” Vivian asked immediately.

  “A number of local businessmen, but when I told them that your headquarters construction was almost completed, they decided it could wait a couple of days.”

  “This might not be what we planned, but we have to start somewhere, Sam,” Vivian said. “We’re going to be hearing from all sorts of people.”

  “I’m not worried about the Wanderers,” he said. “Don’t forget that my co-op job included dealing with all of the human crazies who came into the Vergallian embassy. I’m just not comfortable with accepting free office space.”

  “But you agreed already. If our mentor doesn’t approve when she arrives we can pay Flower back-rent.”

  “And then when my mother finds out that I spent her All Species Cookbook royalties on luxury office space I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “I knew that was it,” Vivian said. “You can’t base your decisions about what’s right for the Human Empire on what your mother will think. Besides, my grandmother is still the embassy manager and your mom put her in charge of our funding.”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this in front of you,” Samuel said to Julie. “I don’t mean we have any secrets—just that we’re talking about people you’ve never met and leaving you out of the conversation. How about showing us a regular cabin if Flower has one ready?”

  “You didn’t like the secret passage?” Julie asked.

  “It’s a bit too much even for me, and I’ve had spy training,” Vivian said. “My mom always taught us that it’s important not to bring the office home, and with this arrangement, it would be impossible not to.”

  “I just finished preparing an alternative option,” Flower told Julie over her implant. “Take them to the freight lift tube at the next corridor junction on the way
to the dojo.”

  “Flower says she has a residential cabin for you to look at,” Julie reported faithfully. “She wants us to use a different lift tube to get there.” The three exited the Human Empire’s new temporary headquarters and headed for the designated lift tube. The capsule was waiting with the doors open when they arrived.

  “It’s smaller than the freight lift tubes on Union Station, but it’s still bigger than I expected,” Samuel said, as the capsule got underway. “Hey, it feels like we’re moving outwards.”

  “Are you sure?” Julie asked. “The next deck is the reservoir and there’s nothing after that but space.”

  “Ta-da!” Flower proclaimed as the doors opened. Directly across from the lift tube, on the grid of metal catwalks suspended over the lake that rode on the inside of the colony ship’s cylindrical hull, was a metal cabin that looked like a two-man trader without the cargo or engineering decks. “Lakefront property.”

  “But the rent must cost a fortune,” Samuel said in dismay.

  “It’s a concept house. You’ll be doing me a favor by living in it and providing feedback.”

  “We can be your beta testers,” Vivian agreed enthusiastically. “Come on, Sam. Don’t be a spoilsport. Flower has obviously gone to a lot of work preparing this.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Julie whispered in the young diplomat’s ear.

  Eight

  Woojin self-consciously adjusted his three-cornered hat before exiting the lift tube. A forty-ish man and a nervous-looking woman in her early thirties were waiting to greet him. The two of them were standing so stiffly in their ‘Flower Shipyards’ lab coats that he reflexively ordered, “At ease.”

  “I’m Laura,” the woman said, hesitating a moment over protocol before offering a handshake. “Flower put me in charge of the shipyard even though my only experience was with building wooden boats back on Earth.”

  “Don,” the man introduced himself in turn. “I used to run framing crews putting up ranch homes, though I would have preferred renovating abandoned housing stock.”

  “Pleased to meet you both,” the captain said. “I understand the two of you came on board for MultiCon a few months back.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “Flower made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to start building two-man traders, though the closest we’ve come so far is taking one apart and putting it mostly back together.”

  “And we made two scale models with the help of a three-dimensional scanner and printer,” Don added. “Don’t sell yourself short, Laura.”

  “Then what are all of those hull sections you’re working on?” Woojin asked, indicating the half-dozen constructions in progress.

  “Flower has had us building stand-alone residential cabins for the writers colony to practice metal fabrication techniques,” Laura explained. “They’re basically the same as the bridge, which is the living deck of a two-man trader. It’s kind of strange, learning fabrication techniques from bots that keep two of their arms behind their backs to demonstrate best practices for humanoids. I don’t quite get why Flower doesn’t just have the bots build the ships.”

  “It’s like that with all the tunnel network species,” Woojin said. “The civilizations that go too far in eliminating jobs end up going into decline and disappearing. If you’ve never seen the interactive museum at Libbyland, you should take the tour next time we stop at Union Station.”

  “Our people aren’t due to meet us in the docking bay for another fifteen minutes,” Don informed the captain. “We have plenty of time if you wanted to take the tour.”

  “Early is on time,” Woojin parroted a common alien saying. “We’re only a minute from the core by lift tube, so I’d like to see what became of all of that equipment we picked up on our jump to Sharf space. My wife told me you ran into some difficulty with the installation.”

  “I thought Lynx was your daughter,” Laura said, and then blushed bright red. “I mean—”

  “It’s all right,” the captain told her. “We have a daughter, Em, and when I pick her up at school, all of the children think I’m her grandfather. Now let’s have a quick look at that equipment.”

  “This way, Captain,” Don said, giving Laura time to recover. “We barely had a chance to open the shipping containers before Flower pulled away all of her bots for rescue operations, but it’s not clear that the help of every bot on the ship would have made much difference in terms of getting up and running. It turns out the Sharf disassembled the machines for shipping beyond the point where we can put them back together just by looking at holograms of the assembly line when it was still installed in the factory.”

  “There aren’t any instructions?”

  “Handwritten, in Sharf. Flower said that the penmanship is so atrocious that she couldn’t read half of it, but she got that alien fellow who runs the anime conventions to stop by and give it a look.”

  “Yaem,” Woojin said. “Was he able to help?”

  “Yes and no. He could read what the other fellow had written and took it all away to make a transcript when he has time, but the instructions were all for operating the equipment, not for assembling a production line. They sent us the entire factory floor, so we have everything from giant presses for stamping hull parts to machine tools for building the life support systems.”

  “How about the drives?”

  “Flower agreed to buy all of the drives and fuel packs from the Sharf, and the controllers will be built by the Verlocks under a Stryx license,” Laura said. “We’re going to build the hulls and finish the interiors with all of the plumbing and wiring, life support, everything it takes for humans to survive in Zero-G.”

  “So what’s your plan for all of this now?” the captain asked, surveying the mounds of disassembled equipment and parts in boxes that surrounded the freight lift tube in rings like the detritus around a crater thrown up by an asteroid impact.

  “Neither of us has anywhere near the knowledge to even make an educated guess about putting that stuff together,” she said. “We’re either going to have to find somebody with relevant experience, or Flower will be forced into spending some serious creds buying the information out of the Sharf archives.”

  Woojin nodded. “If worst comes to worst, we’ll be back at Union Station in another five months, and I’m sure somebody there could help out. Just let me stick my head in one of those prefabs you’re building for the writers colony, and then we better head down to the core and meet your team.”

  The captain almost stumbled entering one of the cabins, because he was used to anything resembling a ship providing entry via a hatch that dropped down to form a ramp, not stairs. Once inside, the difference between a small trade ship and a residential cabin became obvious. Instead of exercise equipment mounted upside down on the ceiling for Zero-G workouts, there was a sleeping loft. The main level also included a kitchenette with a full oven and stovetop, not to mention a sink and water taps, all of which would have been useless in a weightless environment.

  “Pretty nice,” Woojin said after the brief inspection. “It looks like the two of you know what you’re doing.”

  “Interior design for wooden ships and spacecraft isn’t really that different, except for the Zero-G part,” Laura said.

  “And I’ve roughed in enough kitchens to have a decent idea of plumbing and cabinet layout,” Don added. “I’m not sure where Flower got the idea, but building some metal residential cabins loosely based on the two-man trader design was a good way to ease us into spaceship construction. It seems a lot less intimidating now.”

  When the three of them reached the docking bay, a motley crew of largely untrained shipyard workers was waiting. The group barely filled the seats of the front fifth of one of Flower’s large shuttles, which took less than three minutes to make the straight hop directly into the core of the ship under tow. As they filed out the front exit, a young man and an artificial person handed out locator bracelets to everybody who didn’t have an implant.

  “
I see Flower drafted the two of you as well,” Woojin said to Bill.

  “It’s my morning without any classes and I wanted to see the Miklat,” the young man explained. “Then Flower said something about catering hot meals for the repair crews, so I guess I might be back and forth a lot.”

  “We brought the Zarent chief engineer over in the bookmobile twenty minutes ago,” Dewey added. “He wanted to recover some personal effects, and even though they’re on strike, he agreed to give you a briefing on the condition of the ship. That’s him coming now.”

  The workers from Flower’s nascent shipyard gaped at the furry octopus riding a unicycle. The Zarent easily picked out Woojin by his uniform and wheeled right up to the captain, though not even an artificial life form engineered by the Farlings could keep the one-wheeled contrivance upright without a little back-and-forth motion.

  “Captain Pyun,” the chief engineer addressed Woojin by way of a speaker pendant attached to his tool harness. “It was rude of me not to seek you out to offer my personal thanks after you stopped for us.”

  “I’m sure that seeing to your injured was your top priority,” Woojin said. “Your captain approached me immediately after the evacuation to hand over the access codes to the bridge, and then he told me he was washing his hands of the Miklat. I have to admit I didn’t understand.”

  “You know Hortens,” the Zarent said. “They’re obsessed with hygiene so they use it in all of their idioms. When he told you he was washing his hands of the ship, he meant he was disavowing any responsibility going forward.”

  “I understood his meaning, it’s the thought behind it that left me baffled,” Woojin said. “How can a captain walk away from his duty like that?”