Spy Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 4) Read online

  Spy Night on Union Station

  Book Four of EarthCent Ambassador

  Copyright 2015 by E.M. Foner

  [email protected]

  Paradise Pond Press

  One

  “In conclusion, it is the view of Union Station Embassy that our lack of timely intelligence puts us at a severe disadvantage in all negotiations and interactions with the other species, and although we aren’t aware of any imminent threats to Earth or the human Diaspora, that may just be because we aren’t looking in the right places. Uh, actually, the preceding view is Ambassador McAllister’s, but she’s out on maternity leave. It’s a boy, by the way, and she said to point out that you’d know that already if you had an intelligence service, though I’m sure she doesn’t mean that you should start spying on EarthCent employees. She just meant it as a joke, and maybe she didn’t want me to repeat—oh drat. Libby? Can I start over?”

  “Of course, Aisha,” the station librarian replied. “The report isn’t a live feed so you have to say ‘send’ before I release it to EarthCent. And it’s late Friday night at EarthCent headquarters, so there’s no hurry.”

  “Thanks, Libby. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I already did this report once before when the ambassador was on Kasil. Maybe it’s because Kelly said she’s taking the full six months, and instead of being just an intern, I’m now the temporary acting junior consul. Just to make sure I understand, will the report go out if I say ‘send’ in context, like, ‘The Embassy requests you send help’ or something like that?”

  “The office doesn’t have its own dedicated communications equipment, so you’re really talking to me the whole time,” Libby explained patiently. “The Stryx give EarthCent a free pass for handling the basic office infrastructure, which really means the local station librarian gets stuck doing all of the work. So don’t worry about sending the report before you have a version that will make Kelly proud.”

  “That could take a while,” Aisha said dismally. “And the truth is, I don’t understand why the ambassador is worried about us not having an intelligence service. Don’t we already get more news than we can keep up with from all the human traders and crews who come through the station? Joe says, if you aren’t too particular about your company and you’re willing to spend a few creds on drinks, you can find out what’s going on anywhere in the galaxy without ever leaving the station, just by hanging out in bars.”

  “If you’ve started spending your nights in bars since your marriage, I’ll give up on human matchmaking,” Libby replied.

  “That’s not what I was trying to say,” Aisha amended herself hastily. “I meant that I don’t see the need for professional spies if anybody can gather intelligence from bars here on the station.”

  “Who would you suggest sending?” Libby prodded the girl gently.

  Aisha leaned back from the display desk and stared at the ceiling, a habit she had picked up from Kelly, and tried to think a move ahead. She was well aware by this point that Libby, and the Stryx in general, preferred the Socratic method over simply answering the questions asked by humans. It helped to explain why the children attending the Stryx school always struck visitors as so precocious. Paul encouraged her to think of these conversations with the Stryx like a game of chess. So rather than replying immediately, she considered what Libby might say in response to a number of answers and skipped to the conclusion.

  “You’re saying that whether it’s sitting in a bar and listening to tipsy traders or reading the news in thousands of different languages, somebody has to be responsible for gathering and analyzing information?” Aisha summarized tentatively. “But if we start spying on the other species, won’t that make them suspicious that we’re planning something?”

  “Do the other species spy on humans?” Libby parried Aisha’s question.

  “I guess Kelly told me that some of the other ambassadors as good as admitted they were spying on EarthCent the first time she met them,” Aisha confessed. “But that doesn’t mean they expect us to spy back on them.”

  “When you stop on the Shuk deck to buy vegetables for cooking, do you expect the vendors to charge you, or to offer them as gifts?” Libby asked.

  “To charge me, of course,” Aisha answered immediately, before remembering her husband’s advice to look a move ahead. “I mean, yes, of course I expect them to charge me because that’s normal, and if they didn’t take my money, I’d be suspicious that they wanted something else in return. Are you saying that the other species are suspicious of us because we don’t spy on them?”

  “I’m saying that most of the other species see you as being overly dependent on us,” Libby chided the young temporary acting junior consul.

  “But the Stryx must know more about what’s going on in the galaxy than all of the alien intelligence services put together. Wouldn’t you just tell us if there was something we needed to know about? Or maybe we could pay you?” she added slyly.

  “You know better than that, Aisha,” the station librarian addressed the young diplomat as if she were a lazy student. “We’ve been able to keep the peace in our area of influence for millions of years because we are seen as both neutral and largely benevolent. While many of the advanced species grumble about living in a ‘nanny galaxy,’ few of them are actually interested in the alternative of competing power-blocs, which inevitably leads to war. So they rely on our tunnel network for trade, and on our Stryx cred register network, which is responsible for the vast majority of inter-species financial transactions where barter isn’t an option. But if they came to believe that we were spying on them for the sake of humanity, Pax Stryxa would unravel in short order.”

  “So, no, wait a minute,” Aisha cut herself off from answering too quickly once again. She hadn’t played chess in her youth, and she often complained to Paul that she would be progressing faster in their games if he would just let her win once in a while, but he insisted that she wouldn’t learn anything if he played poorly on purpose. Lately, she had taken to waiting until he drank a couple of beers with Joe before suggesting a game, but it hadn’t helped.

  What was it Kelly had said about intelligence? Aisha was so against the idea of spying from the moment the ambassador mentioned it that she hadn’t paid close attention to the older woman’s reasoning. There was something about the need to build up a network of reliable sources and handlers over a long period of time, and something else about the fact that the other species traded intelligence with each other.

  “Kelly said that EarthCent lacks the institutional knowledge to create an intelligence agency, that it would be hard to get started with nothing to build on,” Aisha said. “She even suggested that we might get help from the Drazens, though she doesn’t want to approach Ambassador Bork about it without checking with EarthCent first.”

  “Knock, knock,” Libby announced. “You have a visitor arriving in five, four, three, two, one…”

  “Hey, best friend-in-law,” Blythe said cheerily, as she strode into the ambassador’s office like she owned the embassy, which wasn’t that far from the truth. In a late night brainstorming session with her mother and Kelly over the chronically low funding levels at EarthCent, Blythe had come up with the “Adopt an Embassy” campaign. To help launch the project, BlyChas offered to match the contributions to EarthCent embassies on all of the Stryx stations where InstaSitter operated. Six months later, the girls were contributing more to the admittedly small operating budgets of the EarthCent embassies than the Stryx.

  “Blythe! I didn’t know you were back from your honeymoon,” Aisha replied happily. Her guilt feelings over stealing Paul fr
om his former girlfriend were greatly assuaged when Blythe and Clive had tied the knot the previous month.

  “I just came from visiting Kelly and the baby,” Blythe reported. “She asked me drop in and give you a pep talk about spying because you seemed uncomfortable with the subject.”

  “Of course I’m uncomfortable with spying,” Aisha exclaimed. “Don’t you agree that the only way to establish trust is by trusting?”

  “Wow, you really are naïve,” Blythe said sympathetically as she helped herself to the chair next to Kelly’s display desk. “Everybody spies on everybody else, except for EarthCent, that is, which is why so few of the aliens trust us. They think we’re up to something.”

  “How do you know that?” Aisha demanded with more force than she was usually able to muster when talking with Blythe.

  “They tell me,” Blythe replied bluntly. “It used to only come up once in a while, but since InstaSitter started running ads with the ‘Proud Sponsor of EarthCent’ tagline, the alien entrepreneurs I meet on the stations assume that BlyChas has taken over the human government. So they pepper me with questions about secret treaties, since they’re positive we must be getting intelligence from somewhere. If EarthCent doesn’t establish a spy network soon, nobody is going to want to be friends with us. In fact, the Dollnick we had managing InstaSitter on Hearth Station actually tried to sell me some secrets, in the theory that InstaSitter is really a cover operation for the human intelligence service.”

  “Did you pass them on to Kelly?” Aisha asked.

  “Of course not,” Blythe replied. “It was a misinformation campaign. I had to fire the manager because I didn’t want a Dollnick double agent supervising babysitters.”

  “But how did you know that the secrets were fake and that the Dollnick was a double agent?” Aisha asked.

  “Are you serious?” Blythe questioned her friend in return. “If the Dollnick wasn’t a double agent, he wouldn’t be offering to spy for us. The Dollys may be a little rough around the edges, but they aren’t traitors.”

  “I hate this part of diplomacy,” Aisha declared. “Why can’t we all just be truthful and cooperate?”

  “It sounds to me like you’re confusing diplomacy with being a librarian,” Blythe observed. “My mom told me long ago that the only oath EarthCent insisted employees swear is that they do their best for humanity. If a bunch of aliens came around asking you how to get a special import license for Earth and what sorts of bacteria are best for killing humans, do you think it’s your job to supply the information? EarthCent wants to encourage commerce with the other species, but only where humans get something positive in return. You have to look at diplomatic issues through a filter of what’s good for humans first, and how that affects our relations with other species second. Aren’t I right, Libby?”

  “I might have chosen a profession other than librarian for your example, but on the whole, it’s a fair description for a diplomatic service,” the Stryx librarian replied testily. “And I would point out to Aisha that without timely intelligence, it’s hard to know whether an offer is good or bad.”

  “But it’s spying!” Aisha wailed comically. “It’s practically synonymous with cheating and lying. Haven’t you ever heard that cheaters never prosper?”

  “You’re sort of changing the subject, but I have to say that in my experience, cheaters do pretty well,” Blythe answered. “Did you ever hear that one, Libby?”

  “I’ve heard it, but only from humans,” Libby replied. “Among the species who currently maintain a diplomatic presence on Union Station, it’s far more common for parents to tell their children that an honest man can’t be cheated.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense!” Aisha protested. “I would have said that you can only cheat honest people. If somebody is dishonest, then cheating them is just trying to break even. Oh, now you’re getting me confused.”

  “Try to think of it as a diplomatic forecast rather than spying,” Blythe offered helpfully. “I’ve never been to Earth myself, but I know from the immersives that most planets have this weather thing, where you can be walking along outside, and then all of a sudden, you can drown or freeze to death. Everybody pays for weather intelligence so they can be prepared.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Aisha said in defense of nature, reflecting at the same time that even Blythe didn’t know everything. “I mean, some people drown in monsoons every year or get killed by mudslides or tsunamis, but the weather forecasts aren’t always that reliable. Come to think of it, I guess we did spend a lot of time talking about the weather on Earth.”

  “You see?” Blythe said triumphantly. “And did your neighbors think you were spying on them if you peeked over the wall to see if they had a tsunami on their property?”

  “But there’s still a difference,” Aisha argued, letting the other girl’s confusion over weather events pass without comment. She recognized in herself the familiar feeling of beginning to give in to Blythe’s point of view. “If you wanted to invest in systems to protect humans from asteroids and comets or to predict when a star might go nova, I’d support you one hundred percent. But Kelly was talking about trying to find out ahead of time which aliens are building new orbitals or factory-farms, where they are exploring for new worlds, what secret treaties they’re signing with each other. That’s not the same as the weather.”

  “Sure it is,” Blythe insisted. “It’s like a force of nature that’s outside of our control, but we still have to be ready to deal with it when it comes. What happens to all of the human farmers and sharecroppers if an advanced species starts a mechanized orbital factory-farm producing human food at a fraction of the cost? Wouldn’t you want us to know about that before the market is flooded? And do you want generation after generation of humans to grow up on colony ships without ever finding a home because everywhere they choose to explore has already been taken? And why shouldn’t EarthCent know which aliens are secretly cooperating to advance their business interests at our expense? When it comes down to it, all espionage is industrial espionage.”

  “Is it really that bad, Libby?” Aisha asked.

  “You have to look out for yourself in this galaxy,” the Stryx admitted. “Ignorance is never a defense. And if you know what’s coming and you have good leadership, you can settle most problems before they turn serious.”

  “Alright, I think I’m ready now,” Aisha conceded with a sigh. “If I just dictate a new conclusion, can you add it to the routine stuff?”

  “Of course,” Libby replied. “Here, let me play back your last thought and then you can continue.”

  The two young women listened as Aisha’s disembodied voice, which somehow sounded more mature and professional than the real thing, filled the room.

  “On Wednesday, I met with the Sharf Emissary to Union Station, where we learned to our mutual dissatisfaction that humans are allergic to Sharf skin-and-scale polish. The Sharf is visiting the station as part of a delegation from the unaligned industrial empires, a group I could find no mention of in the EarthCent diplomatic organizations directory, despite the popularity of used Sharf vessels among wealthy humans. Before my face puffed up to the point that I could barely see and had to leave the reception, I heard a disturbing rumor about another off-network species, the Mengoth, who supposedly have it in for humans because we remind them of a race they once served as slaves.”

  “Cue, Aisha,” Libby interjected.

  “In conclusion, it is the view of Union Station Embassy that a lack of intelligence forecasts puts us at a severe disadvantage in all negotiations and interactions with other species. In some cases, our absence on the espionage front may actually be making the aliens nervous, so we encourage EarthCent to begin the work of building an intelligence agency as soon as possible. On a personal note, Ambassador McAllister gave birth to a baby boy on Monday, and she joked that if EarthCent had an intelligence service, she might have received some flowers.”

  Two

  The galactic EarthCen
t Intelligence building in New York City came as a complete disappointment to Lynx Edgehouse, who was at least expecting a doorman. Instead, she found herself struggling to read the white plastic letters of an ancient building directory behind a dull pane of glass that might have gone years without cleaning. After a quick look around to make sure she was unobserved, she spit on the glass and then tried to clean a spot with the sleeve of the ratty winter overcoat she’d just bought for one cred at a thrift shop.

  Acme Exporters – B201

  B as in basement? She squinted in the dim light of the lobby, scanning the rest of the directory for another Acme suite, but B201 was it. She double-checked the scrap of paper the contact man had slipped into her pocket after they exchanged the pre-arranged sign at the spaceport diner, but her memory was unfortunately correct.

  What would my father do if he was standing here in my shoes, Lynx asked herself. The answer came to her immediately and she fished in her belt pouch for a coin. Apparently, she had used up all of her small change in tips or at the peanut dispenser in the bar, because all that she had left was the programmable cred from her Stryx mini-register. The coin’s passive display was flat on both sides so it always flipped true, one side displaying her embarrassingly low account balance, the other side an image of one of the Stryx stations that anchored the galaxy’s transportation network.

  “Creds, I keep going, station, I go home,” she declared, flipping the coin in the air. Although the coins were reputed to be nearly indestructible, she made the mid-air catch and slapped it on the back of her hand rather than letting it bounce off the floor. “Creds.”

  Feeling depressed and trapped at the same time, Lynx punched the down button to summon an elevator. After a long minute, the metal doors to her left slid open, though not quite all the way, increasing her trepidation. Entering the elevator, she ran her finger down the matrix of old-fashioned buttons until she reached B at the bottom left corner. Just B? No B2? She let out a defeated sigh and pressed the button.