Guest Night on Union Station (15 page)

“Time, gentlemen,” Pava reminded them, showing her fangs in a cheerful smile. “We must abide by the rules.”

The ambassadors trooped out of the dining room with the dogs at their heels. The empress relaxed in her chair, looking at the humans expectantly.

“I wasn’t going to say anything, but those ambassadors weren’t very nice,” Lynx blurted out.

“No, I don’t expect they were,” the Cayl said, a twinkle in her black eyes. “But as I mentioned earlier, I think it’s better that we all get a chance to form our own impressions of people.”

“They seem pretty intent on cheating you,” Brinda ventured. “Stryx Vrine explained in our briefing that the Cayl avoid accumulating excess wealth and treat money as a necessary evil. But I’m a professional auctioneer, and I hate to hear of somebody trading in art so far below the market value.”

“Are you referring to my Shiduck?” The empress pointed at the work of art.

“He said the Phweealleet you swapped for it was worth ten times as much.”

“It would have been, if it was an original,” Pava replied with a chuckle. “Of course, my husband’s family is chronically in need of funds, and the real painting was sold before the blood was dry on the treaty.”

Brinda snorted, and a smile spread over her face. “How about the pawn shop for heirlooms run by Z’tan?”

“It’s funny how the species of our own empire treat us like fools,” the empress replied. “We have such a reputation for honesty that nobody ever bothers to ask why we never run out of heirlooms. I’ve sold the Lood a number of primitive ceramics made by the cubs at a very good price. I suspect he believes they are antiques from one of our arts-and-crafts movements that come along every million years or so but he’s never inquired, likely for fear of tipping me off to the assumed value.”

“Your grandchildren just happen to throw pottery that looks like something from your history?” Lynx asked.

“I may have given them a few holograms to look at, and Brynt’s mother helps with the glaze,” the empress said playfully.

“How about the allowance fund the Nangor was talking about?” Woojin asked. “That sounded like the sort of thing that caused Earth’s economy to collapse.”

“It’s how the Cayl in the capital currently get rid of excess income, which is not a problem we ever have around the palace,” the empress said ruefully. “Many of our people take a break from basic research now and then to dabble in freelance technology work for the various species of our empire. Some of the solutions result in patents or licensing agreements that create more income than can be spent on new lab equipment and other essentials. Those Cayl divide the leftover between the colony fleet fund and playing along with the schemes of whatever species needs some financial propping up.”

“You know, that’s sort of the same way the Stryx run things,” Brinda said. “They don’t put garrisons on planets, but the main thing keeping the tunnel network together is economic incentives. You do the same thing in a different way.”

“We would never think to compare ourselves with your Stryx,” the empress said modestly. “One of our greatest scientists proved a thousand generations ago that it’s impossible to solve the basic multiverse equations without scalable artificial intelligence. Still, we chip away at the dimensional membrane using an experimental approach, and the Stryx promise to let us know if we put the universe in danger.”

Fifteen

“I thought you’d never done this before and I was going to be your teacher,” Dorothy said in a disappointed tone. “I’ve been coming here since before it was open, but you’re obviously better at flying than me. I only asked Paul to let us in early and turn on this little practice area because I was worried you’d get airsick.”

“I spent weeks at a time in near Zero-G,” David explained. “The miners would set up an atmosphere retention field around an asteroid and bring in bottled air and recycling equipment, just like it was a ship. As long as you used a safety tether on the surface, it wasn’t that dangerous. Sometimes they netted off whole sections to cut down on drift accidents.”

“Drift accidents?” Dorothy asked.

“The atmosphere retention field only held in gasses. A human body drifts right through it, and then you’re in the vacuum. I’ve seen it happen when kids got careless.”

“Kids?”

“All of the mining outfits use kids as powder monkeys. It takes a long time and a lot of energy for a laser to drill a pilot tunnel in rock, so they use skinny kids to set the charges. You go in the pilot hole with a rope around your ankles so they can pull you out, and then everybody stands clear and you hope that the whole asteroid doesn’t fall apart when the charge blows. The goal is to break up a lot of rock and collapse the tunnel without too much ejection. After that, it’s easy digging to extract and process the rubble.”

“How old were you when you starting doing this?” Dorothy asked, as the two teenagers unconsciously synchronized flying movements. Their baskets dangled by short lanyards from their wrists, and they had their face-shields raised for conversation.

“I don’t know. Pretty young, I guess,” David replied, in sudden embarrassment. “When does the shooting start? I’ll bet I don’t even get hit. I’ve had lots of practice dodging rocks.”

“They’re just paintballs. Paul said the targeting is all automated now, but Jeeves still likes coming in and running it manually. Think of us as the ducks in a Stryx shooting gallery.”

“Is your dog going to keep walking around below us all night?” David asked.

Now it was Dorothy’s turn to be embarrassed. “My mom said it was my dad’s idea for him to come along, and my dad said that Beowulf makes up his own mind about where he goes. Anyway, I can tell from the way he looks at you all the time that he likes you.”

“He looks at me like I’m food.”

The calliope music began to blare, and a mob rushed into the demarcated levitation area from the rentals lobby. Some of them were frequent players who had already bought levitation suits rather than renting every time they came, and most of them had at least partially donned the gear while waiting for the ride to open.

“It’s going to get crowded soon,” Dorothy said unnecessarily, maneuvering alongside David and speaking twice as loud as earlier to be heard over the steam organ. “I’ve never seen so many aliens in the crowd. They must be open house guests from the Cayl Empire.”

“Aliens all look pretty much the same to me,” David replied. “I can tell the four-armed ones apart from everybody else, and the ones with vines for hair, they’re Drazens, right?”

“Frunge,” Dorothy said, taking David’s arm and pulling him closer so they could hear each other without shouting. She heard Beowulf bark to inform her they were close enough. “Until you make some alien friends, it’s probably hard to keep the names of their species straight. See the tall guy with four arms pulling on the orange suit? He’s a Dollnick, but the one over there with four arms and an elephant head? He’s one of the new aliens from the Cayl Empire.”

“Do you have any idea why the Stryx want all of these new species to join the tunnel network? Don’t they have enough aliens already?”

“It’s complicated,” Dorothy replied, falling back on one of her favorite expressions. “The Stryx don’t like to see biologicals or any other sentients going to war with each other. So they offer benefits to the species that join up with the tunnel network in return for not fighting interplanetary wars, though they can do what they want at home. The Cayl Empire is sort of the same, but different. Well, the results are sort of the same. They mainly live in peace and trade a lot with each other, and the Cayl keep everybody in line. But with the Cayl getting out of the empire business, I guess the Stryx think somebody else needs to take over and keep things peaceful.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” David commented. “What’s the guy with the grey feathers there?”

“It’s a she, a Fillinduck. The one over there with all the red and blue feathers is a male Fillinduck, and the silvery one with the feathers on his head giving Paul a hard time is one of the new aliens.”

“I think he’s mad that the helmet won’t fit over his crest,” David said, watching the irate Shuga pantomiming his complaint. “This is almost like being in school.”

“What ‘this’? Our date?”

The gangly boy mumbled something about wanting to try the Physics Ride and not wanting to come alone.

“You came to the lost-and-found and asked me out, so it’s a date, my first one,” Dorothy informed him. “If you don’t believe me, ask Beowulf.” Then she relented since he looked so embarrassed that she was afraid he’d fly away. “So did you get to go to school when you were working as a miner?”

“No, but there were always teacher bots around to learn stuff from when we weren’t working. I guess the Stryx practically give them away, so the miners saw it as cheap entertainment to keep the kids out of trouble. And they used to rotate us between planetary mining and asteroids, because if you stay in Zero-G too long, your bones don’t grow right and you get too weak to work. Sometimes on a planet we’d have a visiting teacher for a while, if they could find one who was cheap enough.”

“So they let you off the asteroids to get healthy so you could work more, just like you were mining ponies,” Dorothy said, her eyes tearing up. “Sometime I wish the Stryx would just take everything over and make people be good to each other, but Libby says that no sentients really want somebody telling them how to live.”

“Who’s the guy with the golden mask?” David asked, mainly to change the subject.

“Another one of the new aliens. Their ruling class supposedly have a third eye behind the mask, and they can make some people do stuff, like the high-caste Vergallian women.”

“The Vergallians are the ones who look just like humans?”

“The ones from the ruling classes are all beautiful, like actors in immersives, only more perfect. The women produce a mix of pheromones that can make men crazy, so just stay away from them,” she warned him.

The main levitation chamber of the Physics Ride began to power up, and thousands of players swam upwards through the air. Some began to experiment with acrobatic moves as soon as their feet left the ground, others concentrated on just controlling which way they were facing.

“Is everybody ready for the Physics Ride?” Jeeves boomed over the helmet speakers. The floating mass of players cheered in response.

“Get your basket ready,” Dorothy urged her date. “Not getting hit is good, but catching and shooting back is how you score points. They put up a scrolling leaderboard last week, so if you get into the top fifty, you’ll see your name and score go by.”

“First round, target-practice,” Jeeves declared. “Five points for a basket. Ten points for a hit.”

“Hit what?” David asked his date. “Are we supposed to shoot at each other?”

“There are discs floating around the edge of the flying space—there’s one now,” Dorothy said, pointing at a paint-spattered object. “My little brother is really good at hitting them, but I usually miss unless I’m moving in the same direction at about the same speed.”

“But we don’t get any ammunition to shoot unless we catch it?”

“I’m good at catching. I can give you the paintballs I catch if you can’t snag any.”

“I’ll have to see how fast everything moves,” David replied. “We used to throw rocks in the air and then try to hit them with other rocks, so I’m pretty good at timing. There’s not much else to do on an asteroid,” he added by way of explanation.

The first colored balls began whizzing towards the crowd, and thanks to their position at the far edge, Dorothy and David were able to see them coming from a distance. Both had a catch within the first few seconds, and David pinged his off a floating disc like he’d been playing all his life. Dorothy’s return shot sailed wide.

“You almost got it,” the boy said encouragingly.

“Did not,” Dorothy replied. “It’s all right. Nobody is good at everything, except maybe Blythe and Chastity, but they don’t count.”

“What happens if we get hit?”

“The suit keeps track and reports back to the levitation controller. If you get hit three times, you’re declared a casualty and you drop out of the action.”

“What if you don’t want to quit?”

“It’s not up to you,” Dorothy explained. “The suit just stops responding to what you do and puts you down. Paul says that all of the computations involved to keep thousands of people flying around in here at the same time would tax a planetary-defense system, but Jeeves repurposed a Verlock weather simulator to do the math.”

“Oh,” David replied, not knowing what else to say. “Watch it!” He stuck his basket out behind her to catch a paintball he’d seen out of the corner of his eye coming at them through the crowd. Then he turned and splashed it off one of the moving targets without seeming to try. “Maybe we should fly back-to-back so we can see the stuff that makes it through the crowd.”

“But how will we know if we start floating apart?”

“You watch the outside and I’ll watch the inside and make sure we keep close,” the boy replied. “The other powder monkeys always said that I had eyes in the back of my head.”

The pair made it through the first round without getting hit, and David racked up enough points with his uncanny accuracy on the returns for his name to appear on the leaderboard. Just as the clock was winding down on the first round, the music from the steam organ rose to a cacophonous wail, and Dorothy saw Paul running towards it. Then the noise gave way to an eerie silence.

“Roll must have ripped,” Dorothy commented to David, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in her own ears.

“I was just getting used to it. Without the music, it kind of feels like being back on an asteroid. I’ll probably have a bad dream tonight about my tether breaking.”

“Praise Hwarith that horrendous noise has stopped,” a nearby flier remarked loudly to his companions. “Between the smell of these Union Station species and the noise they pass off as music, I’m ready to go home.”

“Did you see the old Human working on that silly contraption while we were here yesterday?” asked another of the golden-masked fliers. “A natural slave race, if I’ve ever seen one.”

“You take that back,” Dorothy exclaimed, turning on the trio of Loods. Two of them wore the golden mask of the ruling class, and the third might have been a family servant. “My father imported that steam organ from Earth and it’s a genuine antique. That’s what they’re supposed to sound like.”

“What have we here?” the first Lood speaker said, turning towards Dorothy. “The face isn’t bad. Is it for sale? Ask it if it has a price,” he added, addressing the third member of the trio.

“My Lord Z’fark wishes to know your price,” the factotum relayed politely.

Dorothy turned bright red and clenched her fists, the first time in her young life she found herself at a loss for words.

“What are they saying?” David demanded. He suddenly regretted not accepting Ian’s offer to advance him the cost of a translation implant. Dorothy had told him it was best to get a high-quality one with subvoc capability, so he was saving his money.

“Second round,” Jeeves announced over their helmet speakers. “Elimination. Get ten points for every player you shoot, lose fifteen if you get hit. If your point total goes negative, you’re out.”

“They were making fun of the steam organ my father rebuilt,” Dorothy told David, unwilling to reproduce the actual conversation. “The two with the masks are some kind of higher-ups who are too good to speak to humans.”

A blue ball came whizzing in from the perimeter, and David caught it effortlessly. Then he turned and pressed the button on the handle, shooting one of the gold-masked Loods in the chest at point-blank range.

“Get him,” the enraged young Lood shouted at the servant.

The third alien groped at his ankle for a boot knife, but the wrap-around levitation suit covered the handle. So he kicked his legs and tried to fly at David, but the latter easily avoided the attack. While the servant was awkwardly executing a turn, he was hit by a green paintball fired by another member of the crowd and lost control, the levitation suit returning him to the deck.

“He didn’t have any points saved up so the first hit took him out,” Dorothy exclaimed. “Look, his friends didn’t even let him have a basket.”

The two gold-masked Loods remained floating a short distance away, barking orders at each other.

“Let’s take them down.”

“You expect me to touch those things?”

“Then catch some balls and shoot them.”

“Why don’t we hang gold and make them shoot each other?”

As they argued, David caught another ball and shot the second Lood in the chest.