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

  “Vivian has started coming in to fence with Judith when Samuel is at his new lost-and-found job,” Thomas explained. “She has tremendous footwork thanks to her dance training, but she hasn’t finished growing, and you can’t teach reach. Come along,” he added, as Kevin lingered to watch the contrast between the balletic movements of the young girl versus the energetic style of the athletic woman. “The Galactic Free Press brought in two of their reporters who were kidnapped by pirates to participate in the public hearing, and Clive thought you’d like to meet one of them.”

  “Here?”

  “Chance uses holographic role playing to walk the journalism trainees through badly conceived attempts to get a scoop. Everybody’s favorite is the one where Katya, who you’ll be seeing in a minute, tells some Horten pirates that the Free Press has deep pockets, and that she wants to embed with their crew. She’s a good sport for showing up and talking about it.”

  A group of around two dozen journalists of various ages stood gathered in front of the small platform where the holographic training sessions were conducted. Chance was standing on the stage chatting with a woman whose long black hair was tied back in a ponytail. The moment the artificial person saw that Thomas and Kevin had arrived, she launched into her introduction.

  “So, everybody. This is Katya Wysecki, who was held hostage by pirates for two cycles before your employer received an invoice from the Tharks and was able to ransom her. Yes?” Chance asked, pointing at a middle-aged man who raised his hand.

  “What do the Tharks have to do with it? I thought most of the pirates were Hortens.”

  “The Tharks handle anonymous monetary transactions for all species, on and off the tunnel network,” Chance replied. “There was a delay in getting the demand for payment routed because the pirates communicate through couriers, and apparently they tried to negotiate the Tharks down on their fee.”

  “Leading to this,” Katya interjected, turning her back to the audience and pulling her T-shirt up over her head without removing it. Her skin was richly tattooed with a scene of horses racing across a green plain. After giving the trainees a few seconds to gawk, she pulled the shirt back down and turned to face them again.

  “They tortured you with tattoo work?” a young woman asked.

  “I got bored as a hostage so I volunteered to help the crew’s tattoo artist. That was how she paid me.”

  “Follow-up question,” the same young reporter said. “Other than the boredom, you weren’t, uh, abused in any way?”

  “You mean aside from losing my freedom and being forced to subsist on a synthesized Vergallian vegan diet, which was the only food they could manage that wouldn’t kill me? Keep in mind that the pirates kidnapped me because I was naïve enough to tell them that I worked for people with money. I spent the whole time on the one ship, and they didn’t take any other captives, but they were open enough with their stories that I came to understand that my situation wasn’t the norm. When pirates capture ships in space, they treat the survivors like slaves if they aren’t from a local advanced species.”

  “Now I’m getting confused.” This remark came from the same man who had asked the question about Thark involvement in the ransom. “The pirates play favorites depending on who they capture?”

  “I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m sympathetic to the pirates, but they’re stuck in a delicate balancing act,” Katya replied. “They don’t have the military might to stand against the fleets of any of the advanced species, and it turns out that they can go broke paying reparations if they happen to attack the wrong ship. Pirates have no fear of humans, of course, but when it comes to attacking the shipping interests of other tunnel network members, they have to be very careful. Sticking with small traders that will surrender without a fight lets them minimize casualties.”

  “But what about all of the piracy stories on the Grenouthian news?” the same trainee protested. “They always have immersive footage of pitched battles.”

  “If you pay close attention, you’ll see that most of those incidents take place in other parts of the galaxy, and the bunnies just license the imagery,” Chance informed him. “You also have to differentiate between organized piracy, which you can think of as a multispecies crime syndicate, and rogue pirates. It’s the rogues who are the most dangerous, but they never last for long since everybody is gunning for them, including the conventional pirates.”

  “How about talking a little about how you fell into captivity, Katya?” Thomas called out from the back of the audience where he stood with Kevin.

  “Right. So I was going to be the first human reporter to embed with a pirate crew and write a story from the inside. I know, I know,” she said, anticipating the reaction of the trainees and not pausing for questions. “I was caught up in a silly competition with a couple of other journalists, and I was even hoping I might capture some video with my implant that I could sell to the Grenouthians.”

  “Is that allowed?” somebody called out.

  “You’re supposed to check with your editor first, but some reporters do it on the sly. The paper rarely runs video.”

  “Why not?” the same person asked.

  “Our owner wants the focus to remain on the stories. The managing editor also said something about bandwidth costs and a special deal they have with the Stryx. Now where was I?”

  “About to be kidnapped,” Chance reminded her.

  “Oh, yeah. So when I got out to the frontier, I started going around to shady looking Hortens and asking if anybody knew of a pirate crew willing to host a journalist. I finally found a contact who arranged for me to meet with some pirates in a bar, though I learned later that he basically sold me to them.”

  “But I heard that pirates honor their contracts,” protested a young journalist with a number of visible tattoos.

  “We didn’t exactly make one,” Katya admitted. “I know, I know. I’m lucky that the paper didn’t tell the pirates to just keep me, though the articles I eventually wrote about my experience were so popular that I got a book offer out of it. Anyway, I boarded that pirate ship of my own free will, and I didn’t even figure out I was a hostage until we visited an orbital and they wouldn’t let me disembark to take a look around.”

  “Tell them what you do now,” Chance suggested.

  “So after subsisting on synthesized Vergallian grains and vegetables for over a hundred days, I really got into eating after I was ransomed. These days I’m the roving food and lifestyle editor. My mailbox at the paper is ‘Katya,’ so drop me a note if you come across any interesting recipes or alien foods during your travels that we can tolerate. If the paper hasn’t run it before, you can write it up, and I’ll make sure it gets counted towards your quota.”

  The trainees applauded politely as Katya stepped off the stage. Chance began passing out scripts to the class, and called up a hologram of a different kidnapping for role-playing. The ex-hostage made her way to where Thomas and Kevin were waiting.

  “Katya Wysecki, this is Kevin Crick. Kevin is the young man who recently escaped from a pirate stronghold by stealing an old Verlock trader out of their trophy yard and activating the emergency retrieval network device.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Katya said, shaking hands enthusiastically. “What did you eat while you were in captivity?”

  “Same as I always do,” Kevin replied. “My trader was unarmed, so there wasn’t any damage when they captured me. I had my standard three months of dehydrated and canned rations, plus a good part of my cargo. The two people I later escaped with had also been captured without a fight, and they were on an extended survey mission, so they had plenty of food of their own. I suppose we would have run out eventually if we hadn’t gotten away, but I didn’t really think that far ahead.”

  “Couldn’t you arrange for ransom?”

  “Nobody to pay it in my case. Molly, the scientist who was finishing a research contract after her husband died suddenly, said the pirates were trying to contac
t the consortium of Earth universities that paid for her research to demand a ransom. She knew that it would never get out of committee.”

  “That sucks,” Katya said sympathetically. “Hey. Do you want to get something to eat?”

  “Jeeves arrived during the presentation,” Thomas informed the young man.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work,” Kevin said. “Maybe another time.”

  “I’ll probably see you at the hearing,” Katya replied, and turned to the artificial person. “I don’t suppose you know any good restaurants on this station?”

  Kevin made his way back to the old campground section of Mac’s Bones which now contained a dozen small ships towed back from the anniversary present lot. He glanced over at the fencing area, and saw Vivian standing on guard, while Judith rubbed her wrist and bent to pick up her foil. By the time he reached the Grenouthian lifeboat, it was surrounded by a faint haze and a smell like burnt hair. Joe was shaking his head at the Stryx in disgust.

  “I didn’t say I had ever worked one before,” Jeeves protested. “I said that the theoretical underpinnings were simple enough. Nobody is good at everything.”

  “I still don’t get why the bunnies would install a plasma harp in a lifeboat,” Paul said. “There’s barely room for two full-grown Grenouthians in emergency stasis pods, though they must have ripped those out for salvage before abandoning the boat in Gryph’s long-term lot.”

  “What’s a plasma harp?” Kevin asked.

  “Jeeves claims that the bunnies get a bit panicky if they’re stuck in enclosed spaces without two exits. I’d always wondered why they didn’t have many small trading vessels. He said they use the harp to calm their nerves somehow.”

  “I just want to know how long that stink is going to last,” Joe grumbled. “This lifeboat is a definite scrapper, so I want to finish stripping it before we start building a raft.”

  “A raft?” Kevin moved his hands about like he was putting together an invisible construct, an unconscious technique that helped him with spatial thinking. “Like a bunch of junked ships tied together floating through space?”

  “We’re going to have so much scrap metal by the time we work through all of Paul’s ships that we’ll get the best price by selling direct to one of the orbitals on the network,” Joe replied. “Gryph can push it into the tunnel for a percentage. Less than it would cost in fuel to do it any other way.”

  “Why don’t we take a look at that Sharf ship you liked while Jeeves is here?” Paul suggested to Kevin. “He should be able to tell us whether you’ll need a new core before we start stripping down the old one.”

  “I haven’t even put in a week’s work yet and you’re already trying to get rid of me?” Kevin joked half-seriously. “Am I that bad of a mechanic?”

  “I’m a pushy salesman trying to close a deal,” Paul responded. “Core issues aside, if you can get it space worthy in six months of working in your free time, you’re a better wrench than either of us.”

  “You’re speaking of the Sharf four-man scout that has been reconfigured as a trader, I assume,” Jeeves said. “I can smell a minute gamma leak from here, which means the seals have held containment or there wouldn’t be anything left to escape. Let’s have a look.”

  The Stryx led the way to the scout ship, which was originally designed for speed and survivability rather than cargo capacity. Somebody had modified it by welding four large cargo carriers to the hull, obliterating its graceful lines. Jeeves floated through the open hatch of the technical deck and headed straight for the core, with the humans right behind him.

  “Last owner shut it down properly, I’ll give her that,” the Stryx commented, circling the heart of the ship’s power system. “Most trader captains leave them on standby, but after a few hundred years, there’s nothing left to revive. This core hasn’t been hot for over two thousand years, but I see no reason it shouldn’t outlast you with a little bit of tuning.”

  “Why would anybody abandon a ship like this?” Kevin asked. “I know it’s not beautiful and there’s a limited market for mod-jobs, but if the control systems are as good as the core, it’s got to be worth a hundred and fifty thousand, at least.”

  “Gryph informs me that at the time the last owner retired to Union Station, there was a glut of used Sharf traders on the market due to a new model being released. The owner still had a positive cash balance at the time of her death, and since there were no named heirs, it went to paying parking fees until the account was exhausted a few hundred years ago. Judging by the shape it’s in, the Kurda was certainly fond of her ship.”

  “Kurda? I don’t think I’ve ever come across that species,” Joe said.

  “There were a pair of them at your wife’s ball, but they were wearing environmental suits, so there wasn’t much to see. They do metabolize oxygen, but their air mix is too different from what you breathe to get by on nose filters. The Kurdas share a couple of harsh worlds with the Verlocks, as both species have a high tolerance for sulfuric acid in the air.”

  “So I’ll have to swap out the atmospheric recycling system,” Kevin concluded. “As long as the core is good, I can run some grow lights and add a garden to freshen up the air in the extra cabin space. I learned that from my mom.”

  “You’re going to have to start scavenging for Zero-G exercise equipment wherever you can find it,” Paul reminded him. “Come on. Let’s go see if that stink has dispersed yet.”

  “You’re not bringing in ships as fast as I thought you would,” Jeeves commented.

  “We don’t see the point of filling the hold with unknowns until we sort out the ones we’ve already brought back,” Paul said. “Besides, Joe doesn’t want EarthCent Intelligence to think that we’re pushing them out. There’s actually plenty of room for everybody as long as we keep removing the hulks to build the raft in space.”

  “Just let me know if you want a hand selecting ships to bring in,” the Stryx said. “I have a good nose for value, and I could save you some flight time on the Nova by dragging one or two in myself. I can do it without attachments these days.”

  “I remember when we were kids and all you did was complain about Libby making you study multiverse math,” Paul reminded his friend. “Sounds like it’s finally coming in handy.”

  “Math always comes in handy eventually,” Jeeves replied.

  Fourteen

  Donna stuck her head through the door of Kelly’s office and announced loudly, “Ambassador Srythlan to see you.”

  The EarthCent ambassador came awake with a start and bounded from her chair. Something the previous night had triggered the puppies to engage in a contest over who could produce the longest howl. Then Beowulf had joined in, and Joe had been forced to banish all three dogs from the ice harvester for the rest of the night, which only made them howl louder. Kelly ended up asking Libby to pipe in loud ocean sounds to cover up the racket, but her sleep had been disturbed by dreams about piratical canines insisting on their rights.

  “Ambassador McAllister,” Srythlan pronounced slowly. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping by unannounced.”

  “Not at all, Srythlan. You’re welcome anytime. Donna made arrangements for me to visit you at the Verlock embassy tomorrow, but perhaps your secretary didn’t mention it.”

  “It is why I came,” the Verlock said, moving slowly towards the chair in front of the ambassador’s display desk. “I didn’t want you to have to carry this back from my embassy.” Srythlan deposited a dictionary-sized object wrapped in fine cloth on Kelly’s desk. “I was coming out for the committee meeting at the Dollnick embassy in any case and I thought we might go together.”

  “Certainly, though that’s not for another half an hour,” Kelly replied. Then she realized that it must have taken the Verlock ambassador twenty minutes just to shuffle to her door from the lift tube, and that they would have to leave fairly soon to be on time for the meeting. “Is there any chance that this,” she indicated the mystery package with a no
d, “has something to do with the review?”

  “You remain as perceptive as ever.” Srythlan settled ponderously into the carbon fiber chair that groaned under his weight and began patting his own knee to speed up his speaking cadence from glacial to merely crawling “Our historical records indicate that you are required by the Stryx to solicit constructive criticism of your species from current tunnel network members.”

  “Yes,” Kelly acknowledged with a grimace. “It’s been…informative.”

  “I can sum up the Verlock view in just four words.”

  “We speak too fast? We move too fast? We aren’t sufficiently thoughtful?” the EarthCent ambassador guessed in rapid succession, since they were operating under a time constraint.

  “You are poorly educated,” Srythlan continued, “especially in mathematics. It saddens me that we cannot discuss a wide variety of topics critical to the well-being of the galaxy due to your limited understanding of the underlying fundamentals.”

  “I know I only finished a year of university before I was recruited by the Stryx for EarthCent, but I’m pretty good at percentages.”

  The Verlock leaned forward and began deliberately unwrapping the package as he spoke. “My great-great-granddaughter, Rilrythe, is taking Alien Maths as a third year elective, and she chose to write her term paper on Humans. I have spoken to her about your people at length, and she thought I would be interested in this primer she obtained at some trouble.”

  “Handbook of Mathematical Functions,” Kelly read out the title, “Abramowitz and Stegun.” She opened the heavy tome to the table of contents and gaped. “Are you sure that Rilrythe is only in her third year of university?”

  “Her third year of schooling. She still watches ‘Let’s Make Friends’ after doing her homework.”

  “Srythlan, I’ve never even heard of most of these things. Confluent Hypergeometric Functions? Combinatorial Analysis?” She spun the book around and tapped her finger on an upside-down entry, “Elementary Transcendental Functions? Anybody who puts the word ‘Elementary,’ in front of ‘Transcendental Functions,’ is either nutty or writing for an advanced audience. I’ll bet that this book was intended as a reference for scientists and mathematicians.”