Empire Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 18) Read online

  “If the Farlings ever create Zero-G sickness pills without side effects I’ll think about it,” Dorothy said. “Otherwise, it’s Union Station or Flower for me.”

  “It turns out that my pension can only be inherited by Joe,” Kelly picked up where she’d left off, “and EarthCent doesn’t have any benefits for surviving adult children of diplomats. That means that our only other assets are the items in this ice harvester and our savings, the latter of which Libby will divide among you. So I bought these sheets of stickers and I want you each to pick your favorite animal. Then you can take turns using your stickers to label the items in the house you’ve always wanted.” Kelly offered the sheets around the table, but nobody seemed in a hurry to begin claiming the mounds of books or old furniture. “Come on now,” the EarthCent ambassador said. “Once we’re gone, you’re stuck with our stuff one way or another. What else are you going to do with it?”

  “You’re kind of famous, Mom,” Samuel said. “If Paul doesn’t need the space, maybe we could leave everything where it is and call it a museum.”

  Seventeen

  “It’s a bit early for me,” Kelly said, politely rejecting the Frunge ambassador’s offer.

  “You don’t have to drink the whole glass,” Czeros told her. “Just breathe in the aroma and take a little sip.”

  The EarthCent ambassador didn’t want to start the morning with a drink, especially when she was scheduled to spend the next several hours at the final day of the tradeshow before presiding over the embassy-sponsored farewell lunch for the observers, but she accepted the glass and gave it a sniff.

  “Oh,” Kelly said, and then practically stuck her nose in the glass. “It smells better than the flower market on the ag deck.”

  “Just a little taste,” the Frunge ambassador coaxed her, pantomiming tipping back a glass.

  “Mmmm,” Kelly groaned as her taste buds were flooded. “This is almost as good as chocolate. What kind of wine is it?”

  “The investing kind,” Czeros said. “I paid just over a thousand creds a case for this vintage when I visited Earth a couple of decades ago to see the trees. I’ve arranged to sell ten bottles later today for eight hundred a bottle.”

  “This is the alternative investment on Earth you wanted to tell me about? For some reason, I thought you were talking about putting money in forests.”

  “How are forests an investment?” the Frunge asked.

  “I forgot that you would never cut down trees,” Kelly said, taking another sip of the wine. “This is really, really good. It seems a shame to open a bottle just for me.”

  “I invited my staff to a tasting after you leave. Besides, I know you’ll return the favor if you decide to invest some of that cookbook money back into Earth. I understand that the vineyards are undergoing a renaissance, and I’d like to think that my humble efforts in spreading the word among Frunge connoisseurs has played a part.”

  The EarthCent ambassador forced herself to put down the glass, pulled out her paperback notebook, and flipped to her notes about investing. “It meets the definition,” she said after reviewing the Thark ambassador’s main points. Then she recalled something from her Victorian novels and asked, “Don’t you need to store expensive wine in a cellar so it doesn’t go bad?”

  “It’s important to control the temperature and humidity, but the climate controls available on Union Station are better than any hole in the ground you can find on Earth. I would advise you to stick with bottles, even though some wineries offer price breaks if you purchase by the barrel. The market for labeled bottles is much more liquid, and I’m convinced that the price appreciation is superior.”

  “Would you be willing to go in on an investment with me, just so I can get my feet wet?”

  “You want to trample the grapes yourself?”

  “I mean, I’ve never made an alternative investment before so I’d rather not do it alone. Rather than pestering you at every stage, if we split a purchase, I’d learn something about the process and, uh, give you ten percent of my wine as an advisory fee?”

  “That’s very generous of you, Ambassador,” Czeros said. “I haven’t yet decided what to do with the profits from this Bordeaux, so I’ll contact my agent on Earth and have her look into the upcoming auctions. What’s your budget?”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Kelly said. “It’s a big number with lots of zeroes.”

  “Ah, the problems of wealth. You don’t want to put too much in any particular alternative investment or you’ll distort the market. Did I ever tell you the story about my uncle, the feather broker?”

  “I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”

  “A few centuries back there was a short-lived fad in Frunge society for decorating our hair vines with rare feathers. The red tail-plumes from an Osetruch were quite popular, but a subspecies of the bird had black tail-plumes that never caught on, likely due to the poor contrast with green. My uncle had one customer who was convinced that black plumes were the investment of the future, and year after year, he bought all of the available supply.”

  “So he cornered the market.”

  “He cornered the supply. There was no market, though fortunately, the feathers kept rather well in storage. But the reason I’m telling you the story is that every year, the price of black feathers rose. Nothing like a bubble, mind you, but a steady increase. At last the time came that the client decided to take his profits. He instructed my uncle to sell, but there were no other buyers to be found. The one customer had been the entire market.”

  “What happened?”

  “Dumb luck happened,” Czeros said. “On the very day my uncle was preparing to sell the whole lot for pillow stuffing, a Vergallian tourist who worked in the fashion industry bought every last feather for hatbands and the investor turned a nice profit.”

  “Oh, I’m glad it ended well,” Kelly said. “I think I get the point, though. You’re saying that even if I had the space to store millions of creds worth of wine, I’d be wiser to spread the money around.”

  “That much?” the Frunge ambassador asked. “How could our intelligence estimates be so far off?”

  “Don’t be too hard on them. It seems like we sign a new licensing deal for the All Species Cookbook brand every day, and dealing with alien print editions has been an eye-opener.”

  “Are the royalties that high?”

  “It’s the payment cycles,” Kelly said. “We started with the English edition, of course, and aside from the initial batch that I ordered for embassy use, those books were printed and distributed for us by the Galactic Free Press. Blythe handled licensing the rights to alien publishers for us, but it turns out that everybody uses multi-cycle reporting periods, and then they’re printing so many books that there was a huge reserve against returns. I think the only money we’ve seen from the alien editions so far is from contract-signing payments, but I’m getting buried alive in reports about the royalties we’ll be receiving in the near future.”

  “You were wise not to sell the alien rights for a flat payment,” Czeros complimented her. “I hope you will demonstrate equal insight when it comes to choosing a mentor for the Human Empire.”

  “I actually wanted to get the cash up front, but Blythe talked me out of it,” Kelly said. “And I’m afraid the choice of a mentor won’t be up to me.” She took another sip of the wine and then realized that she had just finished a whole glass. “How do you decide when the time is right to sell?”

  “It depends entirely on the vineyard and the vintage, but experience has taught me that prices on Bordeaux peak at around twenty-five Earth years, give or take a half a decade.”

  “Thank you, Czeros. I really appreciate your help, not to mention the wine,” Kelly said, putting her notebook back in her purse. “Just let me know how much you’ll need to make a purchase and we’ll give it a try. I like the idea of alternative investments, but given your story about the feathers, it seems I should look into some more mainstream opport
unities. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Talk to Crute,” the Frunge ambassador suggested. “The Dollnicks are choosey about who they allow to invest alongside princes, and the minimum commitment may be more than you have, but infrastructure projects like space elevators provide a solid rate of return. I don’t think you’ll be interested in terraforming projects because the timeline is too long.”

  “Thank you again,” Kelly said. “I’ll check with him later today.”

  As soon as she entered the lift tube, the EarthCent ambassador pulled out her racy paperback again. “Libby? Can you tell me anything about the economics of space elevators, or is that competitive information?”

  “The retail pricing is available through standard catalogs, though it’s just a starting point for negotiations,” the Stryx librarian said. “There’s also a secondary market for used space elevators, but you have to be careful about the shipping and installation charges, which can run over half of the total cost for the project. The going rate for a new elevator installed on an Earth-type planet is roughly two trillion creds.”

  “That seems like an awful lot.”

  “Excluding certain military hardware, space elevators, and colony ships are the most expensive manufactured items for sale on the tunnel network. The advantage of space elevators is that once they’re installed on busy worlds, they generate a continuous and predictable stream of revenue.”

  “Can you ping Donna and ask her to get me an appointment with Crute?” Kelly asked as the lift tube door opened on the Empire Convention Center.

  “You can talk to the Dollnick Ambassador right now. He just entered the tradeshow, and it should be easy for you to spot him with his height.”

  “Thank you, Libby,” Kelly said and hurried through the lobby to the Nebulae Room. The young women working the doors looked like they might have been hired from InstaSitter, but they recognized the ambassador and passed her through without requesting to see her badge. Kelly looked down each aisle in search of Crute, but she couldn’t see over enough heads to get a good look.

  “Here to visit your offspring?” a familiar voice at her shoulder inquired.

  Kelly turned and frowned at the empty space, and then a Chert with an alien device mounted on his shoulder seemed to materialize out of thin air.

  “Sorry,” the alien ambassador said. “I still get a little nervous in crowds, which is why I waited for the last day of the tradeshow. Sometimes I activate my invisibility projector and forget I have it on. You must be proud to have two of your children here representing humanity.”

  “Thank you, but Samuel is actually here for the Vergallians,” Kelly said. “You’ve been around the whole tradeshow already? I thought the doors just opened twenty minutes ago.”

  “I slipped in early and reconnoitered so I’d know which booths to stop at. I’m looking forward to your daughter’s miracle fabric demonstration on the hour.”

  “Did you happen to see Crute come in?”

  “Yes. We talked for a moment and he said he was going for the gold.”

  “Is that a sports thing?” Kelly asked.

  “Gold, as in the metal,” the Chert explained. “There are a number of your miners from open worlds selling forward contracts for production to reduce their risk. If I had the cash to invest I’d be tempted myself. Come, I’ll show you where they are. And when you’re choosing a mentor for your empire, keep in mind that we Cherts have held together a civilization with no worlds of our own for longer than we can remember.”

  Kelly followed her colleague through the crowd, keeping a close eye on the yellow alien in case he pulled a vanishing act. She didn’t even notice the Dollnick ambassador until she heard him let out an untranslatable whistle of mirth just a few steps away.

  “You want me to pay now for gold that’s still in the ground?” Crute asked, shaking his head as one might express disapproval to a misbehaving child. “If I wanted to do that, I would open my own mine.”

  “The investment in equipment and mineral rights is appreciable, and I doubt you could match our production cost,” the saleswoman said, tapping the top of a large monitor that faced towards the booth’s visitors. “Just take a look at these figures. The graph shows our production ramping up against the cost per Princely Measure, and the numbers are straight from our Consortium Scales, and audited by the Drazen firm of Tork and Kurg.”

  “So why are the units in Dollnick?” Crute asked suspiciously.

  “I saw you coming,” the saleswoman said and tapped the top of the monitor. All of the numbers that weren’t in Stryx creds cycled through different alien units with each tap of her finger, finally landing back on Princely Measures.

  “It’s not much of a discount, given the risk I’d be taking,” the Dollnick ambassador said doubtfully.

  “The risk is shared. If the price of gold has risen when the contract comes due, you’ll have purchased our production at a discount on the current prices, and the additional gains will be pure profit.”

  “But if the price goes down…”

  “Two options,” the saleswoman said, tapping a different spot on the monitor. The screen shifted to showing something that reminded Kelly of the tote board in the off-world betting parlor, and then she realized that it was a real-time view of the Thark bookmaking operation. “You can hedge any risk by betting that the price will go down, and at the current odds, at worst you’ll break even. Or, you can defer your contract delivery date by six cycles, and we allow up to three extensions.”

  “If the price of gold falls, you’ll give me three more chances at six cycle intervals to take delivery at a higher price?”

  “Correct,” the saleswoman confirmed. “We can’t predict the price of gold on the galactic market, but I do have a graph showing the last hundred thousand years, and as you can see, extended downturns are very rare.”

  “They’d have to be for the Tharks to charge so little for insurance. What’s the minimum contract size?”

  “One-thousandth of a Princely Measure,” the saleswoman said.

  This time the Dollnick let out a low whistle. “That’s a bit more than I can afford. Can you do it in ten-thousandths?”

  “The Thark bookmaking is based on one-thousandth and they’d charge another underwriting fee to change it.”

  “Maybe I can help,” Kelly offered as she stepped forward. “I was hoping to get your advice on some alternative investments, Ambassador, and buying a little gold together seems like a reasonable confidence-building measure.”

  “You call a thousandth of a Princely Measure a little gold?” The Dollnick looked at the EarthCent ambassador with newfound respect.

  “I remember reading some recipes from Dollnick open worlds and everything was in Princely Measures. I thought they were roughly equivalent to tablespoons.”

  “The measures used in cooking are unrelated to measures used in mining,” Crute told her. “The price this fine young Human is offering for a thousandth of a measure delivered six cycles from now is—” he looked back to the screen.

  “Twenty-one thousand Stryx creds,” the saleswoman said.

  “Well, I may have just committed to spending half that on wine with Czeros,” Kelly said. “If you can come up with ten thousand, I’ll put in eleven thousand, and we’ll split fifty/fifty when the gold comes in.”

  “Done,” Crute said immediately, grabbing her right hand in two of his own and shaking it effusively. “As your new partner in alternative investments, I advise you not to make any more deals like this. Even with the discount, you’ll need the price of gold to rise appreciably just to break even.”

  “I’ll write it off to education,” the EarthCent ambassador said, pulling out her paperback and making a note of the transaction. “What I really wanted to talk to you about is space elevators.”

  “So which of you will be paying?” the saleswoman asked.

  “Send the bill to my embassy,” the Dollnick replied, and taking Kelly by the elbow with one of his lower arms,
led her to the boundary between two booths where there was a little open space. “Before we talk about space elevators, Ambassador, let me ask you one other question. Have you ever before made such an expensive purchase on a whim?”

  “You mean, other than my investment in wine this morning?” Kelly took a moment to think. “Well, there was the time I spent the six trillion creds from the Kasilian auction on discounted colony ships to bring them to their new home, but that was entirely a Stryx setup.”

  “Good. In the case of the gold we just purchased, can you tell me how you came to a decision so easily to spend an amount that, according to my information, represents more than half of your annual salary?”

  “I never could have spent my own money that easily, it’s all from the cookbook. I don’t know if Joe and I are even worth that much in cash since he handles our finances.”

  “You feel so overburdened by your embassy’s windfall from the cookbook that you’re just trying to get rid of the money?”

  Kelly stared up at the towering Dollnick. “I hope that’s not what I’m doing. I guess I should have asked more questions. Why were those miners selling gold for future delivery at a discount anyway?”

  “It’s a relatively low-cost way for them to raise funds for operations and lock-in their required margins,” Crute explained. “The novel part of the contract is the opportunity to defer delivery multiple times, but as the miners make their numbers in any case, they’re only risking potential profit.”

  “And what made it an attractive investment for you?”

  “I need the gold,” the Dollnick ambassador said. “I have a niece who is apprenticed to a master goldsmith and she’ll be ready to go out on her own in ten years or so. I want to commission formal tableware settings for my family to help get her launched, so that’s where my half of the gold will be going.”

  “Oh. But I’ll be able to find a customer for the gold, won’t I?”

  “There’s always a market for gold, it’s just a question of price. I’ll talk to some of my relatives when the time comes and maybe they’ll take it off your hands. Now why the sudden interest in space elevators?”