High Priest on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 3) Read online

  “I’m so embarrassed,” Kelly mumbled in reply, repressing a strange urge to continue crying. “I can’t tell you what’s come over me.”

  “You’ll tell us when you’re ready,” Bork reassured her. “Do I have your permission to wrap up this conference so we can all go home and rest?”

  “Yes, please,” Kelly replied, surprised at the relief she felt when Aisha settled into Bork’s vacant seat to keep her company. She tried to remember if the instant coffee she drank at the office that morning could have been a white-labeled depressant cup that got mixed in with her regular coffee. That’s the only thing she could think of to explain her sudden mood swings.

  “Before we conclude the conference and initiate galactic broadcast of the signing ceremony that has already taken place,” Bork put a special stress on the last four words, “I’d like to remind any of you who are looking for work that the Belugian consortium is hiring experienced crews for comet-mining operations in the sector.”

  A groan from the audience showed that they were familiar with the difficulty of the work and the rock-bottom wages and bonuses non-stakeholders could expect to be paid. All of a sudden, accepting a buyout from the treaty commission didn’t look so bad, which was exactly the point Bork wanted to make.

  “I’d like to thank my fellow ambassadors for their efforts in planning this event, especially Kelly McAllister of EarthCent, who volunteered to carry the stone forward despite the thanklessness of the job. If there are any immortal species in the audience, let me take this opportunity to invite you back for the next conference in fifty thousand years or so. Thank you, come again.”

  Bork raised both hands in the Drazen gesture that indicated he was done talking, and the ensuing cacophony of folding chairs scraping the floor gave witness to the fact that everybody got the message and was heading home.

  Sixteen

  Blythe and Aisha met on the ag deck, where Donna’s girls had gotten their start in business by taking flowers on consignment from the nurseries and selling them in the café district at night. The fields were separated by a network of paths that disappeared into the ceiling with the gradual curvature of the deck. Both girls wore shorts and had just come from purchasing rubber soled shoes at the Shuk, after realizing that they only owned high heels, sandals, and in Aisha’s case, dancing slippers.

  “So you should have an advantage, being a dancer and all,” Blythe told Aisha, after explaining the proposed route for the race. “I don’t really do any regular exercise on the station since work keeps me so busy.”

  “Could you tell me again why we’re doing this?” Aisha asked. “I thought we were becoming friends. Can’t we settle this some other way?”

  “Do you want to share him?” Blythe inquired in response, watching Aisha’s features closely. “I didn’t think so. Libby did point out that neither the Stryx nor the majority of the aliens on the station have any problem with plural marriages, but I don’t think I could do it myself.”

  “But he hasn’t ever said anything to me about it,” Aisha protested. “How do you know he wants to marry either of us, or anybody for that matter?”

  “It’ll be one of us, I’ve decided that already,” Blythe informed the diplomatic intern. “He’s my best friend, and I’m not about to allow him to marry just anybody.”

  “I really don’t understand you,” Aisha replied with a sigh. She sat on the grass and changed from her sandals into the cheap sneakers. “How is running in a circle going to change anything?”

  “I don’t know,” her new friend admitted glumly. “But I’ve known Libby my whole life. She handles most of the teaching for the Stryx school in her spare time, you know, and we’ve been in business together for years. If Libby says we should have a contest for who gets Paul, then there must be a point to it.”

  “Are you sure the paths all connect the way you described?” Aisha asked, conceding defeat for the time being. The reality was that she could only stand up to Blythe when Paul was around. Otherwise, the sheer force of the young tycoon’s confidence made her question herself for doubting the wisdom of anything Blythe said.

  “Chastity and I used to come here and walk the same route when we had to talk over tough business choices,” Blythe told her. “It was a bit over a half an hour, but we would walk pretty slow when talking, so it shouldn’t take long running. Besides, the gravity here is a little lower than on the residential decks, though of course, living with Kelly on the docking deck, it probably feels normal to you. So are you ready?”

  “Not really,” Aisha admitted, stretching to touch her toes.

  “Then, GO!” Blythe shouted, and took off running before the startled girl could recover. For three or four minutes the girls ran up the gently curving deck at break-neck speed. Blythe felt her breath coming harder and louder with each inhalation, but she refused to slacken her pace or look behind her. Aisha might have been in better overall shape, but older girls were discouraged from running in her home town because it wasn’t considered decent once they began approaching womanhood. She did her best to keep up with Blythe, but before she knew what hit her, Aisha had a stitch in her side that felt like it was tearing her flesh apart. She staggered to a halt.

  “Wait!” Aisha called to Blythe in one explosive exhalation before bending over and pressing a hand under her ribcage. She couldn’t look up to see whether or not the other girl had heard, so she didn’t know Blythe had in fact stopped running until she felt a hand on her back.

  “Are - you - hurt?” Blythe panted out the question, wondering if she had broken Kelly’s intern. “The oxygen level - is usually higher - on the ag decks. Maybe we started - out too fast.”

  “We?” Aisha replied with a grimace as she tried to rub out the cramp in her side. She decided against trying to straighten up, instead sitting down with an uncharacteristically clumsy thud. “If I’m dying, you’re going to have to hire somebody to help Kelly,” she added accusingly.

  “You’ll be fine,” Blythe assured her. “I really thought you’d beat me - without a problem. Dorothy said you could dance for hours.”

  “Then why did you insist on racing?” Aisha asked her. “Why not a contest you thought you would win? I would have agreed to anything, you know.”

  “I know, and that’s exactly the problem,” Blythe told her. Receiving a puzzled look from her rival, she attempted to explain. “In business, there’s always competition. Even when I was a little girl selling flowers, there were people who saw how much money we were making and tried to do the same thing. Chastity and I never hesitated a moment to do whatever it took to beat the competition. We even spent our savings selling at a loss for a while to protect our turf.”

  “You won today too,” Aisha told her. “I’m the one sitting on the floor.”

  “No, the contest was first one to the finish,” Blythe replied. “I’ve had enough of this for today. I’m taking you out for a meal to apologize when you can get up. Let’s call it a draw.”

  “You still haven’t explained why you seem to want to lose to me,” Aisha insisted, holding out a hand for Blythe to help her up.

  “I don’t want to lose to you, I just don’t want to beat you either,” the other girl admitted. “I guess this was one of Libby’s dumber ideas.”

  “Dumber ideas?” Aisha asked in shock, looking around as if she expected the wrath of the Stryx to descend on Blythe’s head. “It’s probably just that we don’t understand.”

  “You didn’t grow up with Stryx the way station kids do,” Blythe countered. “The Stryx seem to know everything because, well, they sort of do know everything, but that’s not the same as understanding what’s inside somebody’s head. When we go to Infinite Snow Cones for dessert, do you think Libby could guess what flavor you’re going to order?”

  “Probably,” Aisha confessed, knowing that she always became intimidated by the hundreds of thousands of syrup choices from around the galaxy and ordered mango-flavored ice every time. But now that she thought about it, the t
hree times she had gone there with Blythe after lunch, the other girl had ordered a different flavor every time, apparently picking at random. “But I’ll bet she couldn’t guess which one you’d choose.”

  “Why did you join EarthCent?” Blythe asked suddenly, as if she just figured something out. “I mean, I know they contacted you out of the blue with a job offer, that’s how they hire everybody. But why did you accept?”

  “I wanted to help people, to make a difference,” Aisha replied after thinking for a moment. “It was really scary, I didn’t know if my parents would disown me or if I would ever be able to see them or my sisters again. But I knew it was the only chance I would get to leave my village and do something big. And the truth is, I was never happy at home and I didn’t think it would ever get better. So I guess I really did it for myself.”

  “Do you want to become an ambassador?” Blythe continued her line of questioning. “Do you plan on staying with EarthCent until you’re an old lady, or would you do something else?”

  “I haven’t really thought that far ahead,” Aisha admitted. “I know that a lot of the other diplomacy candidates in the orientation course had their whole career plotted out, but I just wanted to get started. I can’t believe how lucky I’ve been, coming here as Kelly’s intern. But would I want to be in charge of an embassy, or sent on a mission to try to talk a whole alien civilization out of suicide? I don’t think so. I was never any good at getting my little sisters to do their chores, and I can’t imagine trying to tell grown men how to act.”

  “I can,” Blythe replied firmly. “If Gryph asked me to take over running Union Station tomorrow, I’d ask him what time I start. I love being in charge. It’s one of the reasons I turned down EarthCent when they offered me a starting post a few years ago. No matter how high you go, you never really get to run anything. It’s all government with the consent of the governed under the supervision of the Stryx.”

  “I didn’t know anybody turned them down,” Aisha said in a hushed tone, looking at the older girl in wonder. “You really are serious about running things, aren’t you?”

  Blythe remained silent for a moment as they reached the little pile of sandals and bags they’d left by the path ten minutes earlier. Nobody had disturbed their things, in fact, nobody had even come by or they would have noticed, but all public areas of the station were under constant monitoring in any case. While there was crime on Stryx stations, it took the form of cheating on contracts or the unpredictable crimes of passion. Of course, most activities that were illegal on Earth weren’t crimes on the station in any case, though the Stryx wouldn’t interfere with species that enforced their home culture’s rules on their own citizens on their exclusive decks.

  “I don’t want to tell Paul what to do,” Blythe said finally. “I’d never know if he loved me or if I was just good at managing him.”

  “I understand,” Aisha replied, wondering if she could ever be so strong herself. “You do love him after all. I was hoping you just wanted to keep him out of habit.”

  “Did you know he got started on his artificial gravity research because I complained about getting space sick all the time?” Blythe asked the other girl as they headed back towards the tube lift. “He gets mad when I call it artificial gravity though, he says there’s isn’t any such thing. But I don’t care whether it’s gravity or acceleration that keeps my feet stuck to the floor and the food in my stomach as long as it works.”

  “He mentioned at breakfast that they were almost finished with the repairs from the first failed experiment,” Aisha replied, and immediately felt guilty for pointing out that she lived with the object of their mutual affection. “I don’t really understand what he’s trying to do. Surely all of the ways of spinning ships around in space have been known for a very long time.”

  “Paul likes proving to himself that things work, rather than accepting everything he reads,” Blythe explained, taking some comfort in the fact that she knew so much more about him than Aisha. “He wanted to start with a simple counterweight, then try it with two ships, and finally, to design a new type of small vessel for humans that can separate into two pieces once it reaches cruising speed. With a long cable between the two halves, a slow spin could give the occupants enough weight to keep their bone mass and stay healthier on long trips. It’s really all about ship design rather than physics.”

  “Is he doing a, uh,” Aisha paused as she fished for the unfamiliar word. “I’m sorry, I forgot what you call it when somebody gets an advanced university degree. Nobody in my family has gone beyond the tutor bot education.”

  “A dissertation,” Blythe supplied the word. “No, the Open University run by the Stryx doesn’t have a formal graduate school like they do on Earth. You can get certificates for achieving occupational competency, like Laurel, who used to live in your room, got accredited as a multi-species chef by the culinary college. But in general, people go to the Open University to study something they’re interested in. It’s not like Earth where you need a degree to get a job doing something. All of the employers I know on the station, human and alien, will let anybody take their job entry tests.”

  “So he goes to the Open University to study ship design, and some day he’s going to want to move to an orbital factory for work?” Aisha asked.

  “Take us to Paul,” Blythe commanded as they entered the tube lift. As the door closed and the lift accelerated smoothly, she returned to Aisha’s question. “No, I don’t think so. If his design ideas work, he might start building custom ships in Mac’s Bones, but I don’t picture him ever going to work for somebody else. What’s the point of that? If he needed to make money, he could go back to professional gaming. I know he still plays Nova with Jeeves at least once a week, and that’s probably enough to keep him competitive.”

  “He was a professional gamer?” Aisha asked in surprise. “But I thought he was our age, maybe one or two years older.”

  “Paul became a Nova grandmaster before he was eighteen,” Blythe told her proudly. “That’s how he bought Joe the tug for Mac’s Bones. And he was the last surviving commander of the Earth fleet in the largest Raider/Trader battle. We could have won too, if Chastity and Tinka hadn’t killed everybody,” she added ruefully.

  “You’re so lucky to have known him so long,” Aisha said enviously.

  “We’ve been best friends since I was twelve and he was thirteen. Joe came to Parents Day and talked about their junkyard dog, so I visited Mac’s Bones afterwards to see Beowulf. But I was really just curious to see where Paul lived because he seemed so nice and shy. Then Joe and Kelly got married, and with my mom and Kelly being best friends, we practically became family.”

  “I never had a best friend,” Aisha admitted sadly.

  “This is what makes the competition so unfair,” Blythe said in mock anger, just before they turned into the corridor where Paul’s lab was located. “How could anybody not like you?”

  Seventeen

  “This first one looks really nice,” Donna said over Kelly’s shoulder, as the women studied the slowly rotating hologram of an attractive planet that floated above the ambassador’s display desk. “But you have to be careful. Stanley claims that a good real estate photographer can make a garbage dump look like a botanical garden.”

  “Where’s the price?” Aisha asked from Kelly’s other side. “I want to keep track of all of the vital statistics so we’ll have a way to compare the candidate worlds.”

  “The prices are on the audio feed,” Kelly replied. “I asked Libby to mute it because the sales pitches made me feel pressured, but maybe that’s just because I was viewing them alone. Libby? Can you turn the sound back on please?”

  “Just say ‘play’ or ‘pause’ to control the audio,” Libby announced. “I just hope you don’t set your heart on any of these worlds before you return to Kasil next week.”

  “Why is that?” Kelly asked sardonically. “You keep telling me that it’s my money and I can spend it any way I want.”
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  “That’s true,” Libby replied smoothly. “But it’s obvious that you’re shopping for a planet to give the Kasilians, and if you do succeed in convincing them to move, I think it would be better to let them participate in the selection process.”

  “First of all, I was thinking of buying one and renting it to them as a business,” Kelly stated, though her declaration lacked conviction. “Second of all, I haven’t been very impressed with their decision-making to this point.”

  “Play,” Donna interjected, putting an end to the theoretical discussion and bringing them back to the serious business of window-shopping.

  “Furlon Six. Paradise at a price you can afford,” the voiceover began. “Are you a nitrogen/oxygen breather? Is your world overcrowded or facing imminent destruction? Do you just need a place to get away from it all? Make Furlon Six your dream planet, all for the unbelievably low price of two trillion Stryx creds. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?”

  The holographic image zoomed through fluffy white clouds, making the viewers feel like they were flying above the surface and coming in for a landing. Lush vegetation rushed at them, causing all three women to lean backwards. Next came picture-perfect white beaches and blue lagoons surrounded by coconut palms.

  “Freeze image!” Donna cried, and stepped nearer to the hologram for a close look. “Isn’t that a picnic table under those coconut palms?”

  “What’s that thing that looks like a sign?” Kelly added. “Libby, can you zoom in on it, next to the driftwood?”

  “The Caribbean Islands Tourist Council asks you to deposit your litter in the marked receptacles,” Aisha read from the blown-up sign. “But who would go all the way to Earth to steal a no-littering sign?”