Guest Night on Union Station (19 page)

“If you don’t want to see them crack their skulls open, fly over the level fields until you wear them out,” the empress told her granddaughter in irritation.

The girl opened one eye and banked the air yacht sharply to starboard, without crossing the river. A couple of the young cubs hanging over the side were caught unawares, and they might have gone overboard if their guardian hounds hadn’t chomped down on the loose fur behind their necks, hauling them back. Below the half-lifeboat, a couple of the racing males failed to make the corner and skidded over the embankment for a steep drop into the river.

“Aren’t those boys risking serious injury?” Brinda asked.

“It’s part of their nature,” the empress replied. “Your Stryx tell us that our species is one of the few they’ve encountered with such an uneven distribution of males and females at birth. We start with twice as many males born as females, but by the time they reach maturity, the ratio is roughly equal. Our boys are utterly reckless.”

“But you’re supposed to be one of the most advanced biological species in the galaxy,” Lynx protested. “Can’t you fix it?”

“Supposed to be?” Pava repeated. “Don’t let my mother-in-law hear you say that. Of course we can interfere with the natural rhythms of our bodies and produce an equal number of males and females, but unless we sedated all of the males or established plural marriage, half of the females would die old maids. Our ancestors tried all three solutions, but it just made everybody unhappy, even the parents who were spared the deaths of their sons. In the end, we developed rituals to help us deal with the short, happy lives of so many of our offspring, and stopped warring with our nature.”

“So with all the science and technology you possess, one of those males showing off for your granddaughter could collide with a tree or a rock and die?”

“It happens frequently on mating runs,” the empress said. She gazed down through the transparent section of hull at the pack of males, which quickly was falling behind. “I doubt any of that lot have the stamina to catch my Krey when she’s ready for marriage. She has fast genes from both sides of the family.”

“And the parents of the boys won’t object over their marrying into the imperial family as your mother did?” Lynx asked.

“Imperial succession is strictly through the male line, so there’s no onus on marrying an imperial daughter or granddaughter,” the empress explained. “In addition to a daughter, I had three sons, two of whom survived and married. Krey is the firstborn daughter of my elder son, Bwine.”

“Ah, I think I finally have it all straight now,” Woojin said. “Bwine is the one Kiki told us she would appoint to replace Brynt if he persists with dissolving the empire.”

“What are you talking about?” the empress gasped, grabbing for a railing to hold herself steady. “Brynt has two younger brothers, Lang and Ruke. They’re both in line to succeed.”

“Tiki said she’s had enough of being Dowager Empress to last a lifetime, and that the empire obviously needs young blood. Wait. If Bwine is your son, wouldn’t that make you the next Dowager Empress?”

“Do you have the ability to contact the Stryx science ship that brought you here, or do we have to return to the palace?” the empress asked urgently. “I need to send Brynt a message.”

“Stryx Vrine said we could get through from anywhere with these,” Woojin said, offering the empress his necklace.

Pava held the empty locket in front of her mouth and spoke into the opening. “Stryx?”

“Yes, Empress,” Vrine replied. “I hope no harm has come to the hostages.”

“Nothing like that, Stryx. I need to get a message to my husband. I’m not requesting your extra-dimensional services, just that you send something through your tunnel next time it’s open.”

“What’s the message, Empress?”

“Brynt. Your mother plans to replace you with Bwine. Pava.”

Nineteen

“Something’s wrong,” Kelly asserted, looking around Mac’s Bones as if she expected to see storm clouds threatening below the atmosphere retention field. “Where’s Beowulf?”

“He ran off by himself after breakfast,” Samuel said, dancing around his mother with an invisible partner. “I wanted to go with him, but he beat me to the lift tube, and then it wouldn’t tell me where he went.”

“He must have smelled something through the ventilation system,” Joe said. “It used to happen from time to time before he was reincarnated. Usually, he’d come back and throw up all over the place, so it’s probably food-related.”

“Do you have to do that, Samuel?’ Kelly asked her son. “Isn’t practicing five days a week enough?”

“The Vergallians practice every day,” the boy told her. “They’re the best dancers.”

“A warrior should know how to dance,” the Cayl emperor said encouragingly. “Dancing helps develop good footwork for sword fighting.”

“I still feel like something funny is going on, and it’s not the dog running off,” Kelly said.

Samuel grinned to himself and went on dancing. He’d noticed that his mother usually deferred to the Cayl, which was great, because the emperor almost always took the boy’s side. The two exceptions were lima beans and bedtime, both of which the emperor insisted were important for growing warriors.

“You’re always looking for problems on Saturdays,” Joe said. “It’s because you aren’t getting embassy pings every minute.”

“That’s it!” Kelly declared. “It’s too quiet. How come I’m not getting any complaints from the merchants in the Little Apple or the Shuk? Why aren’t any of the ambassadors pushing me for another emergency meeting?”

“Good morning,” a familiar young man called as he approached the patio. “Bob Steelforth, Galactic Free Press.”

“It’s the weekend, Bob,” Joe pointed out.

“I’m working,” the reporter said. “My editor sent me to get your thoughts about the Cayl police force that the Stryx hired. I’m sorry for bursting in on a Saturday morning like this.”

“What?” Kelly exclaimed. She turned to Brynt to see his reaction.

“I’m sorry for coming on a Saturday,” Bob repeated, speaking louder and slower for the old folks.

“I meant, what’s this about a Cayl police force?” Kelly said in exasperation.

“Oh. The Stryx hired a whole bunch of Cayl from somewhere. They have dogs that look just like yours, maybe a bit smaller.”

“That’s not possible,” Brynt protested. “I sent my shuttle back through the temporary tunnel.”

“Maybe some of them went freelance,” Bob said, showing off his new mastery of reporting jargon. “All I know is that the Little Apple and the Shuk deck are normal again, and when I stopped at the entertainment district on my way here, you could actually hear the music over the yelling for the first time since all those guests arrived.”

“What’s going on, Libby?” the EarthCent ambassador subvoced.

“Jeeves talked Gryph into asking a few of the second generation Stryx to divert their science ships to some of the closer Cayl holdings to hire temporary help,” Libby replied privately.

“Without telling the emperor?”

“Jeeves said that the emperor seemed a bit touchy on the subject of colonists. We’re talking about the expeditions the Cayl sent out over the past few million years to settle the far reaches of the galaxy. The farther from the Cayl Empire, the closer to us.”

“Emperor?” Kelly asked politely, interrupting his interrogation of the young reporter, who didn’t have any of the answers the Cayl was seeking. “I’m told that the Stryx brought in some of your people from the colonizing groups you sent out long ago. I guess Jeeves had something to do with it.”

“I should have foreseen this outcome after we talked about colonists at the poker game. Will you take me to visit one of the places these Cayl are policing?”

“Right away,” Kelly replied. “I’ll ping you if we won’t be back for lunch, Joe. I’m taking him to the Shuk.”

By the time they reached the lift tube, the young reporter managed to convince the EarthCent ambassador and the Cayl emperor to let him tag along. Brynt gave Steelforth a brief rundown on the Cayl colonization movement, which left the reporter so confused that Kelly had to explain the Cayl’s singular conceptions of honor and respect. In the back of her mind, she registered that the one-minute ride to the Shuk stretched out to at least ten minutes, but there would be time to ask Libby about that later.

“So once or twice every million years, you finish construction of a colonization fleet, load it up with a quarter of your population and treasure, and send them off never to be heard from again,” Steelforth recapped, checking the notes on his tab.

“There’s no treasure in the sense you mean,” Brynt informed him. “We make copies of our libraries and share our laboratory equipment, along with all the usual things colonists would take. We divide everything equally.”

“And you don’t even try to pick up their communications traffic?”

“We intentionally don’t monitor the volumes of space our expeditions have selected for colonization, and I’m sure they avoid listening in on us for the same reason,” the Cayl explained. “It would be a violation of their privacy.”

The young reporter looked at Kelly helplessly. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Am I asking the wrong questions?”

“You’re doing fine,” Kelly told him. “It’s just that the Cayl are aliens and they don’t think like us. You weren’t around ten years ago for the Kasilian auction, but there’s an example of an advanced species which had to let its population collapse and give away everything they owned to regain their youthful optimism and a chance to start over.”

The capsule door finally slid open, and contrary to his usual deferential attitude as a guest, the Cayl was the first one out. The market seemed completely normal, which immediately struck Kelly as suspicious, since it had been anything but since the open house began.

“This way,” she suggested, leading the Cayl and the reporter towards Kitchen Kitsch, in the human section. They hadn’t gone twenty paces before a giant dog, which looked amazingly like Beowulf, trotted up and growled at a group of Shugas shopping at a Gem collectibles booth. One by one, the aliens emptied their pouches of the knickknacks they’d been shoplifting.

“I recognize the Cayl by the paw print of his dog,” Brynt muttered. “Just a saying,” he added, when Kelly gave him a questioning look.

As they continued through the Gem booths toward the human section, they found themselves approaching another, slightly smaller Cayl hound, which was blocking the path of a Tzvim. The dog sat upright on its haunches and had placed a paw in the middle of the alien’s turtle-shell chest, like a crossing guard stopping a rambunctious child from running into traffic.

“I didn’t do anything,” the Tzvim protested.

The dog shook its head, almost sadly, Kelly thought, and didn’t remove the paw.

“But they’re Dollnicks,” the turtle-like alien tried again. “They do stuff like that to other species all the time.”

The dog pulled back its upper lip, revealing a display of enamel that would make a shark jealous.

“I’ll buy it back,” the Tzvim offered in defeat. The dog dropped its paw and indicated the way back to the Dollnick section by raising its muzzle. The two set off, the Cayl hound obviously in charge.

“Your dogs really seem to have a way with your empire’s species,” Kelly commented.

“We couldn’t have run the empire so long without them,” the emperor replied. “Supervising the behavior of adults isn’t a job I would wish on my worst enemy, but our hounds were bred to the task and they actually enjoy it. Every world in our empire has a Cayl garrison and a large contingent of hounds to watch over the local authorities.”

“So you police the authorities rather than the people?” Steelforth asked.

“Of course,” the emperor replied. “Back in ancient times, when our empire only included a dozen stars, we determined that the most effective system was to leave the existing governments in place on the worlds we conquered. All of our occupation efforts went into forcing the local leaders to obey their own laws, with a few additions that we impose on all of our worlds for fairness. Once the system is up and running, it tends to be self-perpetuating, and we’ve never had a serious problem with revolts.”

“Here we are,” Kelly said, as they crossed into the human section near Kitchen Kitsch. “I don’t see any shimmering around the booth, so Peter must have stopped paying for the Stryx security field he told me he rented.”

The Cayl emperor stopped and sniffed the air with an intensity that rivaled Beowulf on a visit to the Little Apple, and then he started off suddenly between a confectionery shop and a linens seller. Kelly and the reporter had to break stride several times to keep up with Brynt, and Beowulf emerged from a side passage and began trotting along with them.

Suddenly, they found themselves face-to-face with a pair of Cayl warriors wearing green tunics with a Union Station emblem. The two Cayl stared at Brynt in shock, and Kelly noticed that their eyes were not on the emperor’s face, but the heavy gold chain around his neck. Then their knees just seemed to buckle and they prostrated themselves on the deck.

“Rise, rise,” the emperor ordered, but they stayed on the deck, one wrapping his arms over his ears. Brynt strode forward, bent down, and grabbed each by a wrist. Then he straightened up rapidly, like a weight-lifter completing a competition lift. One of the strange Cayl found his feet, but the other curled up in the fetal position and dangled by his wrist.

“Is he dead?” the young reporter whispered to Kelly, all the while tapping frantically on his reporter’s tab.

“I think he’s embarrassed,” Kelly whispered back.

“Stop that!” the emperor ordered, shaking the suspended Cayl in an impressive display of strength. “Put your feet down and stand up like a warrior.”

“We didn’t know any First Cayl were here, much less the First among Firsts,” stuttered the other warrior, who had recovered more quickly from the shock of the meeting. “We never would have accepted the job from the Stryx had we known you were in charge here.”

The emperor let go of the wrist of the second Cayl and turned to reply to the speaker. In that instant, the newly released warrior drew a device from his belt that looked like a hilt without a sword, and stretched his arm out in front of his body. As Kelly watched in shock, a fiery blade of red light leapt from the hilt, pointing towards the holder’s own chest.

“Accept my life to atone for the offense given by our column,” the warrior declared, but before he could impale himself or fall forward on the blade, a massive pair of jaws closed on his wrist, snapping the bones like tinder. The blade disappeared as the hilt fell to the deck.

“Good dog,” the emperor said to Beowulf, who was in fact astounded by his own deed, never having bitten anybody before. Beowulf wasn’t really sure what it was all about, but he didn’t like seeing a weapon pulled in front of his ambassador or the emperor, even if it was pointed the wrong way. Kelly would have sworn the dog gave her a wink before resuming a fierce expression and staring at his victim. The pain of a broken wrist seemed to be just what the doctor had ordered. The warrior’s stoicism took over and he stood at attention.

“Both of you stop acting ridiculous,” Brynt barked. “You’re Cayl warriors doing a job and that’s what your honor depends on. This station belongs to the Stryx, and I am merely here as a guest while representatives of the species from our empire attend the open house. The outrageous behavior of our citizens has been a great shame for me, but as a guest, I couldn’t think of interfering with the Stryx administration.”

“Yes, First,” the two warriors said, though Kelly suspected it was the only acceptable reply the Cayl had for any pronouncement of their emperor.

“How many of you are on the station?” the emperor followed up.

“One column from Second Cayl and one column from Fourth Cayl,” the uninjured warrior answered promptly. “It was a great shock meeting our brothers here, and the Stryx tell us that columns from Third, Fifth and Sixth Cayl are on the way.”

“You,” the emperor growled, turning to the injured Cayl. “Go to the column surgeon and have your wrist repaired.”

“It’s fine,” the Cayl protested. “I’m perfectly capable of carrying out my duties.”

“I heard the bones crack and you’re dripping blood on the floor,” the emperor said, but he relented after taking a moment to put himself in the warrior’s shoes. “At least wrap something around it so you don’t make a mess.”

“Yes, First,” the warrior snapped in response.

“Inform your column leader that I will visit your field headquarters this evening,” the emperor continued. “As the two of you are the only colony Cayl I have ever met, I request you join me after your shift in a meal to honor the occasion.”

“Yes, First,” the pair responded.

The emperor gave them a stiff head nod of dismissal, but stopped them with a question when they started to turn away. “Which colony are you from?”

“Fourth Cayl, First,” the more loquacious of the pair replied.

“Carry on,” Brynt said.

“Will he be all right?” Kelly asked as the injured Cayl moved off, his wrist tucked into his armpit to prevent dripping.