Review Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 11) Read online

  Review Night on Union Station

  Book Eleven of EarthCent Ambassador

  Copyright 2017 by E. M. Foner

  In response to reader requests, a character and plot synopsis to bring readers up to date for Book Eleven is now available free on the author’s website:

  www.ifitbreaks.com/cast.htm

  The complete EarthCent Ambassador series is now available in paperback through Amazon.

  One

  “In conclusion, it is the view of Union Station Embassy that the upcoming review of humanity’s progress towards integration with the tunnel network will be a valuable opportunity to solicit guidance from the older species, especially those which generally hold themselves aloof from dealing with us outside of diplomatic contacts, and I fully expect a positive report.”

  Kelly inhaled and shook her head ruefully at her unintentional edit. She had planned to say something encouraging about how all of the alien businesses setting up shop on Earth in recent years were creating a small but effective pro-human lobby in some quarters. Unfortunately, it had slipped her mind after she began speaking, and she doubted her ability to include it in a new conclusion without forgetting something else.

  “The purpose of our soliciting guidance from existing tunnel network members is to give them a chance to influence the decision process regarding your probationary status,” Libby informed the ambassador.

  Kelly reflexively glanced up at the ceiling before replying to the omnipresent Stryx librarian.

  “I thought this whole review was just a formality, though to tell you the truth, I’m still a little fuzzy on what we would gain by getting off of probationary status and becoming full members. Jeeves already told me that Earth will remain a protectorate until we develop a self-defense capability.”

  “The primary benefit is access to certain information that is currently being withheld due to your probationary status.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m afraid that answer would fall within the domain of certain information that is currently being withheld due to your probationary status,” Libby replied innocently.

  “Sounds like a pig in a poke to me,” Kelly grumbled. “Do you think I should be doing something to prepare for the review? It came up at our last intelligence steering committee meeting, but none of the other ambassadors had any ideas.”

  “There’s really not anything you can do to prepare at this point.”

  “Are you implying that we could have done something if we started earlier?”

  “Would you have grafted on two more arms to please the Dollnicks, or sprouted a tentacle to curry favor with the Drazens?”

  “I guess not.” Kelly began to push her chair back from the display desk, but changed her mind mid-action and returned to her original position. “Am I forgetting anything else? Didn’t Donna ask me to do something before leaving? Maybe I should look over my calendar for the next few cycles.”

  “Are you that afraid to go home and face Dorothy?” Libby asked, her synthesized voice taking on a concerned tone.

  “I know I’m being a bad mother but I just can’t take it anymore. She’s been willing herself to be miserable ever since David eloped with Hannah. It’s not like he didn’t ask Dorothy to marry him at least three times.”

  “It did seem to me that she was pushing the two of them together,” Libby mused. “If Dorothy had been a client of my dating service, I would have stopped sending her serious prospects like David until she showed a willingness to commit.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. It’s been three months already, and if she loses any more weight, she’s going to be able to model her own clothes. David was a great guy, and I would have been happy to have him as a son-in-law, but who ever heard of finding a future husband in the lost-and-found?”

  The Stryx librarian remained silent.

  “Libby? Was the whole David thing one of your setups?”

  “Brinda just entered the embassy,” Libby announced. “No need to get up. I’ll override the lock for you.”

  The door to Kelly’s office slid open and four puppies, each of which was the size of a mature Great Dane, tried to enter at the same time, creating a jam. Then they burst through all at once, sprawling on the floor and rolling joyfully over one another. The younger Hadad sister followed them into the room.

  “Is it that time already?” Kelly asked, surveying the rambunctious puppies with a combination of amusement and dismay.

  “I wish we had room to keep them all, but the truth is we barely have space for Pava,” Brinda said, referring to the female Cayl hound named after the emperor’s wife. “We would have needed to farm them out cycles ago if Jeeves hadn’t temporarily rented the apartment next to ours and put in a dog door to double our space.”

  “That was pretty nice of him.”

  “He said it was in the benefits section of my partnership agreement for SBJ Fashions and I didn’t ask to read it. My sister’s family has been adopted by the female, and one of the males took a fancy to Blythe’s twins. She and Clive agreed to accept him on a trial basis, provided we give them a return option.”

  “Well, I suppose Beowulf will keep the last two in line until we find somebody they can respect. How did Pava react?”

  “She chased them all out of the apartment five minutes ago. That’s how I knew it was time. The Cayl have invested millions of years in breeding these hounds for military service, so they know their duty. Watch this.”

  Brinda clapped once, and the four puppies immediately stopped their frolicking and formed a row, sitting tall on their haunches.

  “Who’s going to Shaina?” Brinda asked. “Fall out and wait for me in the other room.”

  One of the puppies backed out of the row, gave each of her brothers a sniff to impress their scents on her memory, and then trotted out of Kelly’s office without looking back.

  “Which one of you picked Blythe’s kids?”

  The puppy on the end let its tongue loll out of its mouth, winked at the other two, and then followed his sister.

  “We speak English to them all the time, so you shouldn’t have any more trouble communicating than you do with Beowulf,” Brinda explained.

  “Which means they’ll understand when they want to,” the ambassador observed dryly. “Okay. I guess the two of you are coming home with me.” Kelly eyed the puppies with trepidation, and they both gave her such innocent looks that she just knew they were going to be trouble.

  “The house will feel pretty empty with only Pava left,” Brinda remarked wistfully. The two women paused in the outer office, the puppies crowding around them.

  “You still have Walter and the baby,” Kelly reminded her. “Hey. Can I interest you in taking Dorothy off our hands? We’ll pay room and board.”

  “I’d rather have all of the puppies back, even without the extra apartment space. Dorothy’s driving us nuts at work on the odd days she actually bothers to come in. Last week I asked her what colors she wanted for the new prototypes, and she answered, ‘What difference does it make? They’re just shoes.’”

  “She said what? I don’t believe you. Shoes are her life.”

  “Affie and Flazint have both come to me separately to ask if there’s anything they can do to help, but even though they’re Dorothy’s best friends, they have trouble understanding what happened. Affie doesn’t get why Dorothy is upset because David was just a—I can’t remember her exact term, but it was a Vergallian word that implied a practice boyfriend about whom one feels possessive.”

  “That seems like a pretty accurate description.”

  “And Fl
azint keeps forgetting that Dorothy and David didn’t have a negotiated companionship agreement, so she’s always offering to go over the contract to check for violations.”

  “I’ll talk to Dorothy again,” Kelly replied with a sigh. “Maybe the puppies will cheer her up.”

  Brinda repressed a shudder on hearing Kelly’s last three words. “Ugh. Did you know that Jeeves has been trying to cheer her up at work with his insane concept of humor? Trust me, you don’t want examples.”

  The female Cayl hound whined and scratched at the floor, evidently in a hurry to move on to her new home. Both women were glad of an excuse to drop the conversation at that point, and they followed the puppies out of the embassy. The ambassador headed for the lift tube with the two she was bringing home, and Brinda strolled off in the opposite direction to drop off a puppy for the twins.

  When Kelly exited the lift tube in the corridor outside of Mac’s Bones, the two puppies immediately picked up Beowulf’s scent and tore off in search of their father. The ambassador followed at a funereal pace, which seemed fitting given Dorothy’s ongoing mourning over the loss of her practice boyfriend.

  “Can we keep them?” Fenna asked excitedly. Kelly halted her slow march back to the scrapped ice harvester that served as the extended family home, happy for a reason to delay entering. Aisha’s six-year-old daughter looked like a doll next to the giant puppies, which were being careful not to knock her down in their frolicking. “If we can’t keep them both, can I have one and give the other one to Mikey?”

  “Mikey’s mother already took one from the litter,” Kelly said, avoiding the rest of the question. “Is your mom home?”

  “She’s in the kitchen hiding from Aunty Dorothy,” the little girl replied. “Do you think David would come back if we offered him a puppy?”

  Kelly sighed and pulled up a patio chair to sit so she could talk to Fenna without towering over her. “I don’t think Dorothy really wants David back. She just didn’t want him to leave.”

  “I don’t understand,” Fenna said, frowning slightly.

  “Neither does Dorothy. That’s the problem.”

  “Then you explain to Daddy so he can explain to us,” the little girl suggested. “Daddy can explain anything to anybody. He even draws pictures.”

  Kelly smiled and gave a noncommittal nod. Dorothy had always looked up to her adopted older brother as well. It was true that Paul had an engineer’s understanding of how things worked, but a young woman’s heart wasn’t as easily managed as interstellar travel.

  “Hello Fenna, Ambassador,” a friendly voice intoned in English.

  “Uncle Dring!” Fenna exclaimed. She ran to hug the Maker who rented space in Mac’s Bones for his gravity surfer, which, like the shape-shifter himself, could be reconfigured in infinite forms. “Are you staying for dinner? Mommy has been in the kitchen cooking for hours.”

  “Hiding from Dorothy,” Kelly muttered under her breath, which drew a sad look from the Maker. “You don’t know any memory wipe tricks, do you, Dring?”

  “Had I not been bound to silence, I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.”

  “Wait, don’t tell me!” Kelly said, recognizing Jane Austen’s language, but unable to place the line. It had been a while since she had played the quotation game with Dring, who was an avid reader of human literature. “Pride and Prejudice?” she hazarded a guess.

  “Sense and Sensibility,” he chided her.

  Kelly closed her eyes for a moment and racked her brain for a quote relevant to Dorothy’s state of mind. Finally, she blurted, “But what was a girl to Dombey and Son?”

  Dring shook his head sympathetically. “You really are out of practice, Ambassador. Dickens, obviously.”

  “And the book?” Kelly demanded.

  “But you already told me the book.”

  “I did? Oh, it’s ‘Dombey and Son,’ isn’t it?”

  “Good one, Mom,” Dorothy said, slouching up to the group in a shapeless garment that might have been a Verlock nightgown. “I hope you stay for dinner, Dring. Aisha makes way too much when it’s her turn to cook.”

  “Hello, Dorothy. You haven’t stopped by my garden lately. Is work keeping you that busy?”

  “Work?” The fashion designer looked puzzled for a moment, as if she were trying to recall something. “What day is today?”

  “Friday,” Fenna piped up.

  “Friday evening,” Kelly appended. “If you’re just getting up, you missed work again. I had a talk with Brinda just now, and everybody is worried about you at the office.”

  “I was tired,” Dorothy said defensively. “I’ve been working so much lately that I needed time off to rest.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Kelly replied, tapping her foot and waiting for a response. The mother and daughter glared at each other in a stand-off, which the Maker finally broke by changing the subject.

  “Speaking of fathers and sons, I saw Joe, Paul, and Samuel head out on the Nova earlier.”

  “They must have gone to look at Paul’s surprise anniversary present,” Dorothy said.

  “Paul bought Aisha something for their anniversary and he took Joe and Samuel to see it?” Kelly asked.

  “No,” her daughter corrected her in a bored tone. “Aisha bought Paul a bunch of abandoned space junk when Gryph auctioned it off for unpaid long-term parking bills. I guess Jeeves put her up to it.”

  “Here comes Daddy now,” Fenna cried, pointing towards the ceiling over the small-ship parking area of Mac’s Bones. The Nova was just penetrating the atmosphere retention field that kept all of the air from rushing out into Union Station’s vast core when the bay doors were open. The tug set down silently thanks to a Dollnick docking system, rebuilt by Joe and Paul with help from Jeeves, which could handle small ships over short distances with manipulator fields. The Nova lowered her cargo hatch, which doubled as a ramp, and Beowulf and Samuel charged out.

  “Aisha bought Paul a fleet!” the teenager yelled when he was still twenty paces away. “There are hundreds of ships in the lot. It must have cost a fortune.”

  “Libby?” Kelly subvoced. “Is that right?”

  “I would say she got a bargain,” the Stryx librarian replied privately over Kelly’s implant. “Working for the Grenouthians has turned her into a tough negotiator. She also brought Jeeves to the auction with her, leading the other bidders to assume she had Stryx backing.”

  “What are she and Paul going to do with hundreds of alien spacecraft?”

  “They haven’t consulted me about their plans, but I suspect Paul and your husband will try to cannibalize enough parts to repair a number of ships in order to sell them. When owners stop keeping up with their parking fees, it’s usually because they’ve determined the asset isn’t worth the outlay.”

  The two men made their way to the ice harvester, stopping occasionally to retrieve Beowulf’s favorite chew toy from whichever puppy ran up and dropped it in front of them, and then throwing it back towards the training area. Beowulf ignored the provocation and strode alongside Joe with the air of a dog that had more important fish to fry. Samuel ran inside to report to Aisha, Fenna right behind him, and Dorothy allowed Dring to escort her up the ramp, though the Maker didn’t seem to be having any success at engaging the girl in conversation.

  “You should see it, Kel,” Joe enthused. “Aisha finally found something to do with all that money she’s been raking in.” His foster son stood by quietly, looking a little dazed by his good fortune. “Go on, Paul. Get in there and thank her.”

  “It’s not our anniversary for another three weeks,” the younger man mumbled. “I haven’t even gotten her anything yet.”

  “Just seeing your face will be all the present she needs,” Kelly said with a laugh, pushing him towards the ramp. “What about you, Joe? Are you going to add a second retirement job?”

  “I put some thought into that on the return trip and I’ve decided that it’s the right time for me to step bac
k from the training camp. I’m getting too old to teach hand-to-hand combat, and all that hardware that Aisha bought, it’s like a dream come true.”

  “I thought you had your fill of the scrap business.”

  “This is different. When I took over Mac’s Bones, most of the junk was really junk. I mean, it had already been picked over and crushed for recycling, and just finding a usable part was a big deal. I suppose most of the ships in the auction lot are in rough shape, but they all have intact hulls and complete systems, even if they haven’t been maintained. You know that at some stage alien space technology stops advancing quickly because it becomes inefficient to constantly replace equipment that does the job just fine. We can still get parts for most of those ships, or strip them and sell the parts. Comparing Aisha’s present to the old Mac’s Bones inventory is like comparing a gold mine to a pile of tailings.”

  “If you say so,” Kelly said agreeably, linking arms with her husband and strolling towards the ice harvester ramp. “As long as you’re happy, I’m happy. Who do you think Thomas will bring in to replace you?”

  “Probably the agent he had helping when we were on Earth. He said that she had a way with the trainees.”

  “The one with the sword?”

  “Judith. Samuel will be happy to have somebody to practice with instead of the fencing bot.”

  Kelly scowled, but didn’t say anything.

  Two

  “That green overlay must mean that they’re charging their front projectors to fire. Does this ship have any defensive shields?”

  “I can’t figure out how to turn them on,” the young man replied, desperately gesturing his way through the options presented by the holographic controller. “I hoped it would have a Stryx controller, but this ship is so old it should be in a Verlock museum. I think these are blueprints and operational procedures, but without being able to read the instructions…”

  “They’ve fired!” the older woman said, and simultaneously, the lights on the Verlock trader dimmed to the point that the three humans could barely see each other. “You blocked it, Kevin.”