Date Night on Union Station Page 15

  Libby withdrew from contact, leaving Kelly alone with her LoveU and her thoughts.

  Twenty

  “I’m over here. I ditched the silver suit,” Joe called out and waved as Kelly entered the Burger Bar. Her black cocktail dress and heels made her the best-dressed person in the place. Joe had taken Laurel’s word that the silver suit made him look sleazy, so he decided to wear clean jeans and a T-shirt that didn’t advertise anything, though it required a trip to the Shuk to come up with both. On the bright side, he hadn’t seen any flower girls, so maybe the casual look served as a deterrent.

  After a mutual, cursory introduction that didn’t get past first names, Kelly and Joe agreed on ordering a couple of draft beers through the automenu, and then spent a few awkward moments sizing each other up across the small wicker and glass table. It was Kelly, feeling aggressive and self-conscious at the same time, who first broke the silence.

  “You’ve been on an Eemas introduction before?”

  “Three,” Joe replied with a pained expression. “And this will be the last.”

  Kelly barked a short laugh. “Well, I could take that either way, I guess. So you’ll understand that I’d like to check on a few particulars before we commit to ordering food?”

  “Go ahead,” Joe replied, folding his arms across his chest. “But I get to ask a question of my own for every one of yours.”

  “Deal.” Kelly nodded. “You can even go first.”

  Joe nodded, somewhat grimly, Kelly thought, then looked her in the eyes and asked, “Are you, uh, on duty?”

  “On duty?” Kelly thought it over. “Well, in a sense I’m always on duty, or at least, that’s how most of these dates have turned out. How did you know?”

  “You just looked a little too good to be true,” Joe admitted and exhaled in disappointment. “I suppose this Eemas thing is a smart way for you to meet guys who can afford your price, but I can see that you’re out of my league, and I haven’t done that sort of thing since I got out of the soldier of fortune business anyway.”

  His meaning slowly dawned on Kelly, and the blood rushed to her face as she restrained herself from taking a swing at him. “I’m the EarthCent ambassador to Union Station, not a prostitute! I thought you guessed that the Stryx have been rigging my dates for work!”

  “Oops.” Joe raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I didn’t mean to offend you. All I was trying to say is that if you had been on the clock, I’m sure I couldn’t have afforded your price.”

  “Hmmph.” Kelly was still offended, but then again, these Eemas encounters could make anybody suspicious. “Could you start by showing me your hands, please?”

  Joe held out both hands over the table, fingers spread, rock steady. Kelly dipped a corner of her napkin in the newly arrived beer, took a hold of his left hand in hers, and began scrubbing his ring finger.

  “You don’t mind, I hope,” she said apologetically. “I’ve had some issues with missing wedding rings in the past, and your hands are dark enough that it would be easy to blend a line out with makeup.”

  “Do you really think I would use makeup to hide a wedding ring tan line? Your dates must have been even worse than mine,” he joked and favored her with a crooked smile.

  “Actually, the wedding ring guy was the cream of the crop,” Kelly replied. “As long as I have your hand, would you mind terribly if I just gave it a little prick?”

  “Like with a pin?” Joe asked incredulously, then he shrugged and gave in. “Go ahead, I’ve had that one before, but don’t expect me to sign anything.”

  Kelly took a second, closer look at his callused palm and fingers, then let her gaze follow the prominent veins in his wrist up his heavily muscled forearm, which was hatched with scars and burn marks. “Never mind. They wouldn’t build an artificial human with as many dings as you’ve got. I guess nobody could accuse you of wasting your life living in the lap of luxury. Are you originally from Earth?”

  “Born and raised,” he replied. “Didn’t leave until I was twenty. Yourself?”

  “Yes. I left at the same age, as a matter of fact. The Stryx offered me a job before I finished my second year of university.”

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but being an important diplomat and all, would you describe yourself as having, a, uh, dominating personality?”

  “Do you mean am I bossy?” Kelly asked and reflected for a moment. “No, at least I don’t think so. I’m not afraid to take charge and make decisions when I need to, but I’ve never started a war.”

  Joe grimaced and forced himself to be more specific. “I meant, do you like to dress up in leather, own a dog leash without a dog, that sort of thing?”

  “Oh.” Kelly’s mouth held the shape of the word until she filled it with beer and swallowed. “No, I’m not into that sort of thing. I couldn’t afford the accessories even if I wanted them. But speaking of restraints, and please don’t be offended, but have you ever kidnapped a woman for any reason?”

  “Sure,” Joe answered, and took a long pull at his beer as Kelly froze in shock. “Not for myself, you understand, just business. Uh, nothing dirty,” he added, when he noted that Kelly was still staring at him. “Royalty, wars of secession, that sort of thing. Look, if I could do it all over again, I don’t think being a soldier for hire would have been my first career choice, but you know what options we had on Earth back then.”

  The waitress who had delivered their first round of beers came back to take their food orders. It was part of her campaign to convince her mother, who owned the Burger Bar, that automenus lacked the personal touch. Kelly ordered the basic burger, medium rare, with lettuce and tomato plus a large side of fries. Joe felt a little embarrassed when he mumbled, “Yeah, I’ll have the same. And another round of drafts.”

  “Do you have your own apartment, Joe?” Kelly instantly regretted the words when she heard them come out of her mouth because she thought the question made her sound like a gold digger.

  “Not exactly,” he admitted, and took another pull at his draft. “It’s better than an apartment really, much more space than any deck quarters I’ve seen on the station, and it’s great for sleeping since the gravity is a bit weaker.”

  “Are you saying that you live on a ship, that you’re only on the station for business?” Kelly asked in dismay.

  “Well, I am on the station for business, and to get my foster son an education, but I do live here, three years now. My business is on the docking deck. It takes a lot of space and I rent a standard bay. The living quarters are in a retired ice harvester module that was built to house an entire crew.”

  “So if it was really a ship once, it has its own atmospheric control, and nobody can mess around with the shower temperature. Right?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Joe answered, wondering if Kelly came from a family of building contractors or something. “I’ve replaced most of the plumbing with standard gravity fixtures. You wouldn’t want to have to use a vacuum attachment every time you need to, uh, to go,” he concluded awkwardly. “It’s taken me a while to learn how to manage a business, but I’m getting some help sorting through the, uh, inventory, and if I can get rid of half of it for cash and then sublet the open space, we’ll be in pretty good shape.”

  “I have a little trouble in the rent department myself, thanks to a greedy weapons merchant and some overpriced tug service. What do you do?”

  “I’m sort of a recycling engineer,” he replied, feeling a bit of guilt over the deals he’d struck with the EarthCent negotiator. Well, if things worked out, he could make it up to her later. “I do some buying and selling too, occasional repossession. What’s the EarthCent ambassador doing buying weapons anyway?”

  “I wasn’t buying, and they weren’t for me in any case. It was a cancellation fee to peacefully settle a contract dispute that could have caused problems back on Earth. But I didn’t know that they were going to take it out of my salary.”

  “That’s pretty
rough,” Joe sympathized, resolving to order the most expensive imported beer for the next round and to insist on picking up the check. Then he had another thought. “Wait, you aren’t here looking for an after-work job to pick up some extra money, are you? I already have a sort of a dependent housekeeper.”

  “No, I’m not here for a job interview,” she answered in exasperation, but then her aquarium date flashed before her eyes, and she felt a wave of relief. “And thank you for not being here to solicit my services.”

  “You know,” Joe said as he settled back for a moment and looked at Kelly appraisingly, “I know this is going to sound corny, but don’t I know you from somewhere?”

  “We may have bumped into each other in the last two years,” she replied as the food arrived and they both reached for the ketchup. Joe got there first, but he just picked the bottle up, removed the cap and handed it to her. Kelly promptly dumped half of it on her plate for the French fries.

  “No, I mean from before.” Joe’s face took on a look of concentration as he strained to remember where he had seen her. “Maybe we were on some rock at the same time?”

  “Have you ever been on Vitale Five, or Thuri Minor?” Kelly asked, lifting her burger for a bite.

  “Nope.” Joe paused to inhale a fry. “How about Strapii, Grenouth or Pluge?”

  “Was Pluge the one entering an Ice Age?”

  “That’s it!” he replied with his mouth full, and hastily swallowed. “When were you there?”

  “Let’s see,” Kelly said, as she tried to put all of her assignments in order. “It was just a six-month stint, a little over nine years ago. They had just started the greenhouse project to try to increase the temperature.”

  “No, I was there a couple years later, in charge of a security detail to protect the greenhouse gas facilities from the side that wanted the planet colder. We were there for less than a year before the side that hired us gave up and moved to a warmer planet.”

  “How about Vergal Seven, or Eight or Thirteen?” Kelly asked.

  “I was on Three for a couple months once.” Joe winced at the memory. “Almost bled to death.”

  “Hang on for a sec,” Kelly said, then subvoced, “Libby? Can you check if Joe and I were ever on the same planet at the same time?”

  “Are you out on your date now?”

  “Yes, we were just comparing our work histories.”

  “Do you think he’s having a good time watching you talk with me in your head?” Libby asked.

  “Oh, never mind.” Kelly dropped the connection herself, and looked up to see Joe powering through his burger while watching a video screen across the room.

  “Sorry about that. I guess I’m getting a little over-dependent on my implants,” Kelly apologized.

  “No worries. I was just catching the results from the Nova tourney. Looks like the man who beat my boy in the semifinals will win the championship on points. So the way I see it, the kid finished second, which is pretty impressive for a thirteen-year-old.”

  “That is something to be proud of,” she agreed. “Did you hear about the scandal with the doctored juice?”

  “I drank two bottles,” Joe replied with laugh. “I’ll stick with beer, it wasn’t that much fun. I noticed that the only Frunge player remaining after the round withdrew for personal reasons, so I’m guessing something happened behind the scenes.”

  “I think the Stryx went through the evidence and it pointed to the Frunge working with some bookie, but they said there was no reason to pursue it because the Frunge were all out of the Nova rounds at that point. Are you going to finish those fries?”

  “Help yourself,” he said, making the universal open hand gesture before relaunching their galactic geography game. “How about Kraaken, Theodric, or Hoong Prime?”

  “No, I was only on worlds that had at least a consular presence. Well, the one exception was my second assignment, when I was basically a head-counter for the statistics branch, and they rotated me through the colony ships,” she explained. “And that was even less exciting than it sounds, except for the one time I went out on the advance scout just to see what they did and we ended up jumping into a war.”

  “That can happen when you go off the tunnel network,” Joe said. “It’s where we got most of our ship-to-ship fighting in, outside of the Stryx areas. In Stryx space, it was mainly surface actions on planets that treat war as a way of life. Which war did you jump into?”

  “I don’t even know,” Kelly was embarrassed to admit. “We were all on the bridge for the jump, and when we came out, everything was crazy. Most of our ship’s systems were immediately disabled by a suppression field, and before the captain could take any action, the airlock was forced from the outside, and we were boarded by humanoids in armored space suits. They never took their helmets off, so they probably weren’t oxygen breathers.”

  “This was around fourteen years ago?” Joe felt a tingling at the back of his brain.

  “Yes. They lined us all up and I was sure we were going to be killed or taken prisoner, but instead they took our captain and left the bridge. A minute later, the captain was back and he told us not to worry, that they were letting us go. A few minutes after that, our systems came back online and the captain hit the emergency return. So my one war story isn’t even a story,” she added.

  “Your hair was short then, like you had shaved your head and were letting it grow back,” Joe spoke slowly, looking off into the ceiling lights. “There were only six of you, four women and two men, and the ship wasn’t even armed. It was the Mengoth war, if you were still wondering. Not many human mercenaries fighting in that one. We were already losing the war when your ship popped into our lines, so we nailed you with a suppression field and did a quick recon. Two days later we were running for our lives, and if you’d jumped into Mengoth space then, none of you would ever have seen home.”

  “Wow,” was all Kelly could say. “I mean, thank you. Can you imagine the odds of us meeting here fourteen years later?”

  “Got to be better than one in a hundred million, or it couldn’t have happened,” Joe ventured. “At least, that’s the rule I always use for buying lottery tickets.”

  After that, they drank two rounds of expensive bottled beer, but Kelly couldn’t focus on the conversation. She just sat staring at Joe, alternating between his face and his hands, and thinking about those few minutes of terror that encompassed her experience of war. Before she knew it, Joe had insisted on paying the check, and they found themselves standing outside the Burger Bar. Kelly willed herself back into the present.

  “This was nice Joe. I have to admit that I feel a little funny about how things turned out, but I’d really like to see that ice harvester of yours sometime.”

  “Hey, why not come take a look now? No point putting off until tomorrow what we can do tonight.”

  Kelly hesitated for a moment, but she could have sworn that she heard both her mother and Libby yelling in her implants to just say “Yes.”

  “Yes, that sounds nice.”

  They were strolling slowly towards the tube lift, oddly nervous in each other’s company, when they encountered Blythe and Chastity. The girls were tricked out in dazzling white flower girl dresses and were holding matching bouquets. They were also facing opposite directions and straining their eyes up and down the corridor.

  As Joe dug in his pocket for change without being asked, Kelly inquired, “What are you girls doing now?”

  “Hi, Aunty Kelly. Did either of you see a lady run by in white dress with the train dragging and a man in a suit chasing her?” Blythe asked.

  “No, I don’t think we did.” Kelly looked to Joe for confirmation, and he shook his head in the negative. “What are you up to?”

  “A couple we sold flowers to last week told us they were getting married and asked to hire us as the flower girls to be in the wedding pictures,” Chastity explained.

  “So we thought it would be a great new business opportunity, and we bought these
dresses and made up the special bouquets and everything,” Blythe sounded increasingly upset.

  “But when they got to the ‘Do you take this man,’ part, the lady said she felt sick, and then she took off running with the man right behind,” Chastity blurted.

  “And we never got paid!” Blythe stamped her foot. “We’ll never be able to sell flowers on the corridors in these dresses, they’re useless. We look like rich girls!”

  “And nobody would want to buy a fancy bouquet like this for just a date,” Chastity sniffed, with a teary edge in her voice.

  “I’ll take a bouquet,” Joe offered generously. “Uh, how much are they?”

  “It’s two creds for a bouquet, but we’ll let you have them both for four since you’re our best customer,” Blythe offered.

  “What is he going to do with two bouquets?” Kelly asked, drawing a look of betrayal from Blythe.

  “You could get married!” Chastity exclaimed. “We’ll even be the flower girls, and you can take pictures with us for free.”

  Kelly shook her head at the girl’s nutty scheme and turned with a broad smile to share the joke with Joe, but he seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Now that’s a proposition you don’t hear every day,” intoned a low, melodious voice. They all turned to see a hefty man with giant sideburns, who was dressed in a skin-tight white sequined outfit, open at the neck. He held an old-fashioned microphone in one hand.

  “I’ll tell you nice folks what,” the Elvis impersonator continued like he was singing a ballad. “You help these nice little girls out by getting hitched, and I’ll do the ceremony for half price. We had a sudden cancellation earlier so I’ve got a free slot.”

  “Half price!” Blyth grabbed Kelly’s hand and began pulling her into the Elvis Chapel.

  “She’s really nice,” Chastity encouraged Joe while tugging on his arm. “And if you have a baby boy you don’t want to keep, we’ll buy him from you. We’ve been saving up forever.”