Vacation on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 7) Read online

  “Kelly and the kids couldn’t agree, so they decided to let Libby pick for them.”

  “You didn’t get a vote?”

  “I’ve already been to more places than I care to remember,” Joe replied. “I’m just happy to be able to take Dorothy and Samuel on vacation without having to get them a bunch of inoculations against flesh-eating bacteria. And thank you for talking your wife into letting us bring Ailia along.”

  “It wasn’t a hard sell in the end. It wouldn’t have been any fun for the girl to hang around Mac’s Bones after school with just me and Dring for company. Aisha doesn’t think it’s appropriate to take Ailia to work when she’s not in the cast rotation.”

  “Now that’s all settled, are you going to be around for the game?” Joe asked. “Herl is coming tonight, and he always has a couple interesting tricks up his tentacle.”

  “Aisha and I are taking the kids out to dinner and an immersive,” Paul said. “It’s supposedly the first Earth production to gain any traction with the alien audiences, something about children and dragons bonding together as warrior pairs to fight an invasion.”

  “I hope it’s not too scary for Samuel and Ailia,” Joe said. “Samuel only turned six a couple weeks ago.”

  “Aisha got all of the details from the Grenouthian distributor. It’s based on the first part of some old series that’s seven books long, and the invasion doesn’t happen until the last book. They’re only making one every other year so they can show the actors growing up. Samuel will be done with school by the time it gets bloody.”

  “I sort of remember seeing a movie series when I was a kid that had been made that way,” Joe said. “My parents told me that there was a time when the release of a new sequel was a big event, with people lining up outside of theatres in the middle of the night to be the first to get tickets.”

  Paul put a hand to his ear, a courtesy gesture many humans used when carrying on a subvoced discussion over implants. He seemed to be listening more than replying, and finally he said out loud, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Something wrong?” Joe asked.

  “Just my brain,” Paul replied. “Aisha and the kids are waiting for me in the Little Apple. I thought we were meeting here. See you later.”

  Paul jogged off towards the exit from Mac’s Bones, and Joe busied himself setting up for the poker game. He put out the chips and found a fresh deck of cards. Then he remembered that Kelly had volunteered to help Donna set up for the monthly EarthCent mixer and would no doubt fill up on free finger food from the caterers. He went into the kitchen and made a meal out of leftovers for himself, though most of it ended up in Beowulf’s stomach. Then the man and the reincarnated dog took a stroll around Mac’s Bones to see if there were any last-minute emergencies before the card players began arriving. Three hours later, Joe was beginning to wish that one of the campers had flagged him down for an urgent repair.

  “Are you two playing teams or something?” Lynx asked Shaina, throwing down her cards in disgust. “Every time Jeeves drops out of the bidding, you take the pot, and every time you drop out, he takes it.”

  “We just know each other’s style from playing countless hands on the auction circuit,” Shaina explained. She raked the pot into her large pile, leaving a ten millicred chip in the middle of the table to ante for the next hand. “You’re lucky Brinda isn’t here tonight because she and Jeeves are practically telepathic.”

  “You’re just making excuses because you can’t accept that your sister has a better poker face than you do,” Jeeves told his business partner. “It’s a wonder she doesn’t bluff every hand, given your inability to read her.”

  “Can I deal this time, or am I still on gofer duty?” Daniel asked. It seemed that whenever the cards came his way, Joe sent him to refill the pitcher, explaining that the house went by mercenary rules, where the youngest did all of the running. When the junior consul returned from his last trip to the brew room, he found Beowulf sitting next to his chair, glumly shaking his massive head. Fortunately, the Huravian hound had folded Daniel’s hand rather than trying to draw to an inside straight, so the beer run only cost him his ante.

  “I guess we can let you give it a try,” Joe replied. “My luck can’t get any worse. Just don’t call any of that one-eyed jacks and suicide kings nonsense.”

  “Actually, I was kind of hoping to talk you guys into a hand of Rainbow,” Daniel insinuated. “Any objections?”

  “I don’t have a Horten deck,” Joe said.

  “I brought my own.” The junior consul pulled a fat box out of an inner pocket and shook out the alien deck. He smiled self-consciously before springing all of the cards from one hand to the other in a magician’s arc.

  In his best imitation of a Wild West saloon gambler, Woojin drawled, “I think we got us a card sharp, Joe. Last time I saw anybody do that at a poker game, it ended in a knife fight.”

  “Not in my house,” Kelly called from the couch, without looking up from her book. Joe and Woojin exchanged glances. Neither of them missed the bad old days, but there were times when the poker games in Mac’s Bones with the ambassador in the wings seemed just a little too tame.

  “Does everybody know the rules?” Daniel inquired, pausing before he dealt.

  “What kind of Drazen would know the rules to a Horten card game?” Herl asked, doing his best to look offended.

  “The spymaster kind,” Lynx retorted. “I’ve seen you in the casino.”

  “Rainbow it is,” Daniel announced, and began dealing the cards around to the eight players. “In deference to my elders, I won’t call any wilds, but these are genuine Horten cards, not the cheap Dollnick knock-offs.”

  “You mean they can change color spontaneously?” Shaina asked. “I’ve heard of them, of course, but I’ve never played with the genuine article.”

  “It’s not exactly spontaneous, they’re just trying to blend in,” Woojin explained. “If you have four red ones, a blue one and a white one, they might all turn pink after a while. So if you keep the bidding going long enough, a garbage hand could turn into a flush, or a straight into a straight flush.”

  “Don’t help her,” Lynx said gruffly. “She’s already got half of our chips.”

  “Now who’s playing teams,” Shaina replied archly. “Thank you, Woojin. I’ll keep that in mind when your fiancée is bidding.”

  “Hang on,” Herl said. “Somebody didn’t ante.”

  “Dealer doesn’t ante in Horten games,” Daniel informed him. “Are you sure you’ve played this before?”

  “Of course, of course,” the Drazen spymaster said, but he looked and sounded rather like a confused old man. Five minutes later, he looked like a happy, middle-aged gambler raking in a pot.

  “I can’t believe I fell for that,” Lynx groaned. She began stacking her remaining chips by color to see how far she was down. “Of course, of course,” she mimicked the Drazen. “I’m just a poor old spymaster in over his head who doesn’t even know the rules to the game.”

  “My cards never changed color,” Jeeves complained. “If the white one had just turned blue, I would have had a higher straight flush than Herl.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want it hard enough,” Shaina suggested.

  “I don’t think it’s fair that I have to abstain from using my natural talents while the rest of you are allowed to affect the color of the cards with your emotions. I vote that artificial intelligences at these games be allowed to employ one non-memory-related advantage.”

  The humans and the Drazen all extended a hand with a thumb pointed down.

  “It’s not like you ever go home a loser,” Lynx said. “If we let you start reading skin temperatures or applying facial analysis algorithms, you’d have a catalog of tells as good as reading our minds. Besides, you could just skip any future Horten hands or let Beowulf sit in for you.”

  “Nix on that,” Joe interrupted. “If I have to choose between Jeeves reading my skin temperature and Beowulf sniffing out my e
motions, I’ll go with Jeeves every time. Besides, you don’t want to be in the same room if that hound loses a big pot. He never could stop himself from going all-in on aces.”

  “It’s my deal,” Woojin said, retrieving the standard deck of cards and shuffling. “Five card stud, everyone antes, no blinds.”

  “Did I mention that some guy tried to get me to sign an anti-EarthCent petition in the Little Apple at lunch today?” Daniel asked. The game stalled while Woojin picked up the cards after misfiring on an attempt to imitate the junior consul’s card trick. “He seemed to think we’re collaborating with the Stryx to repress him.”

  “Here, on the station?” Kelly looked up from her book again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You and Donna were out all afternoon setting up for the dance thing,” Daniel reminded her. “I invited the guy to come to the embassy next week and talk to us about it, but who knows if he’ll show up.”

  “Did he sound sane?” Kelly asked. “We’ve had complaints about EarthCent from time to time, but never a petition.”

  “He was very polite, and his suit looked expensive,” Daniel said. “Do you get a lot of political protests here?”

  “This is the first one I’ve heard about,” Kelly replied. “I don’t get it at all. If he doesn’t trust us or the Stryx, what’s he planning to do with all of the signatures? I remember reading about petitions somewhere, and the whole point was to deliver them to whoever is in authority.”

  “I guess I should have taken the time to read it, but I was too hungry,” Daniel said. “He mentioned that he only arrived yesterday, so it’s hard to imagine that he has anything against the Union Station embassy in particular. He did say some pretty harsh things about the tyranny of the unelected, though.”

  “Did you hear that, Joe?” Kelly asked. “Somebody told Daniel that I’m a tyrant.”

  “I’m sitting right here, Kel, you don’t have to say everything twice,” Joe responded in exasperation. “Are you sure you don’t want to try a hand?”

  “No. You know how I feel about gambling,” Kelly replied, looking down at her book again. It seemed like she’d been on the same page for a half an hour.

  “This may be a red herring, but I watch the mercenary job boards just to keep up with the flow, and I’ve seen a number of human settlements posting requests for police contractors in the last few days,” Woojin said. He paused to deal out the first two cards. “I was going to bring it up with Clive when I had enough data points, but the interesting thing is who was placing the ads.”

  “You just told us,” Lynx said. “Human settlements.”

  “The work was on human settlements, but in all of the ads the contact person was listed as a mayor or executive of some sort. I’ve never been to a human settlement with an executive form of government. Even those two off-network colony worlds we visited, Kibbutz and Bits, handled everything informally.”

  “It makes sense that independent groups of humans who find they require a government would look to their history for precedents,” Herl said. He peeked at his hole-card and grimaced. “I believe that Drazen cities had something like mayors before we began settling other worlds.”

  “How does colonizing space change the need for government?” Lynx asked. “If anything, I would have guessed that frontier worlds and colonies would have even more need of a strong executive. I used to go armed and worry about losing my cargo to criminals when trading took me to those places.”

  “By the time we developed faster-than-light capability and joined the tunnel network, we’d had a much longer time to mature than humans,” Herl replied modestly. “At some point, your typical species discovers that the most economically efficient way to run a community is to get along with one another. The infrastructure and service providers who collect fees are the closest thing to local government on most Drazen worlds. While we aren’t immune to crime, it’s handled by our planetary defense forces.”

  “My cards tonight are a crime,” Joe growled, refilling his glass from the pitcher.

  “So you’re saying that thanks to the Stryx, humans have gone from hitting each other over the head with rocks to flying around the stars, without having the time to become civilized?” Lynx asked.

  “The effort required to develop the science and technology for even the crudest jump-drives requires a high degree of cooperation,” Herl replied. “Was there ever a time that humans were willing to invest half of their economic output into something that would take generations to accomplish?”

  “Aren’t there any aliens who figure out the science stuff for themselves before they’re ready for it?” Kelly asked.

  “Would you at least please come and sit with us if you’re going to participate in the conversation?” Joe begged his wife. “I’m getting a sore neck looking over at you every two minutes.”

  “I’m reading,” Kelly replied, but she waited for Herl’s answer.

  “Technology outpacing maturity is one of the defining factors for unstable species,” Herl replied. “It doesn’t always end badly, of course, but many of those species who survive long enough to join the tunnel network end up retiring back to their own worlds because they can’t get along with the rest of us.”

  “The rest of you can get along without me for a hand,” Joe said in disgust, mucking his cards and rising from the table. “Kelly, I’m getting you a chair.”

  “I don’t want to interfere with your game,” Kelly protested, but she came over to the table and took Joe’s vacated seat. “Have you heard about any problems with humans committing crimes in Drazen space, Herl?”

  “Raise ten,” the Drazen spymaster said, tossing a yellow chip into the pot. Everybody except for Jeeves and Woojin folded. “To be perfectly honest with you, I doubt we’d notice. The only places in Drazen space with high concentrations of humans are consortium-managed worlds, and they handle their own policing internally, as a business expense.”

  Woojin gave each of the two remaining players another face-up card and then dealt one to himself. He and Jeeves both looked to the Drazen for the bet.

  “Pass,” Herl muttered.

  Jeeves tapped the table with his pincer.

  “I’ll raise twenty,” Woojin said, throwing two yellow chips in the pot. Lynx tried to peek at his hole card, but he slapped her hand away. “No free samples until after the wedding,” he told her. Herl folded his hand, but Jeeves pushed two yellows into the pot to call.

  Woojin dealt a third open card to Jeeves, who paired his exposed seven. The dealer paired his five. The Stryx and the ex-mercenary regarded each other across the table for a long minute, and then Jeeves tapped with his pincer. Woojin slid him the final card without raising, and then dealt one to himself. Neither player improved their hand by the cards that were showing.

  “Pass,” Jeeves said.

  Woojin hesitated, toying with his stacks and picking up a blue chip, which was worth a whole cred. Then he dropped it and flipped over his face cards, conceding the pot.

  “You beat me with what you’ve got showing,” he remarked.

  “That makes no sense,” Kelly complained. “Why did Herl raise and then drop out, and then you raised and dropped out, and neither of you could beat a pair of sevens? With eight players, I’d think somebody would always get a better hand than that.”

  “Hoping for the best can get expensive,” Lynx told her. Then she turned to Herl and asked, “Did you know about all of the empty decks on the station?”

  “We don’t really pay that much attention to Stryx affairs,” the Drazen spymaster replied. “I do know that all of the stations I’ve visited are continually undergoing new construction, but it plays out so slowly in biological time that migrations are rare.”

  “Migrations?” Kelly asked.

  “When they slow the spin rate,” Herl explained. “The Stryx never build into the hollow core of the station, they add decks to the outer hull. The core radius is large enough that each new deck isn’t moving that much faster than
the one below it, but every few million years, there are enough new decks that they have to let the rotational rate decay a bit. Otherwise, the angular acceleration at the outer hull would keep creeping up, and it would be hard to find biological tenants who were comfortable carrying that much weight around.”

  “Why keep building with all of the empty decks?” Shaina asked.

  “Keeps the bots in practice,” Jeeves said, performing a one-handed deck manipulation with his pincer. “Are we still playing?”

  “I seem to remember hearing of an early Grenouthian documentary series about the unoccupied decks on one of the stations,” Herl commented, moving his ante into the center of the table.

  “Libby?” Kelly inquired out loud. “Do you remember a documentary about the empty decks on stations?”

  “Hidden Treasures of the Stryx,” the librarian replied scornfully. “It was more of an exercise in showmanship than a documentary. The Grenouthians promoted each new episode for cycles in advance. They featured interviews with questionable historians, and speculative reenactments of lurid episodes attributed to whatever species once occupied the deck. By the time they got around to actually sending in an immersive crew and finding an empty field or pile of abandoned junk, the viewers didn’t care anymore because the Grenouthians had already started teasing the next episode.”

  “Did they feature any of the decks we’ll be visiting?” Kelly asked.

  “That show was shot on Corner Station. I have no idea why Farth ever gave the Grenouthians access in the first place, but it was over a hundred thousand years ago, and none of the first generation Stryx have seen the need to repeat the experiment.” Libby replied.

  Joe returned to the table with a chair dangling from one hand and bowl of pretzels in the other. Beowulf waited for the owner of Mac’s Bones to sit, at which point the dog came over and dropped his head on the man’s lap, waiting for a salt fix. “Are you playing my chips or should I raid the bank for you?” Joe asked his wife.