High Priest on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 3) Page 4

  “What market?” Aisha asked in reply. “The market left with the people who emigrated, and there was no possibility of exporting food before the orbital elevators were constructed, when I was around twelve. My grandparents and parents had plenty to eat and lots of room to themselves, but money was hard to come by.”

  The lift gave a sudden lurch as it changed directions again, throwing Aisha against Paul, who easily caught her with his gamer’s reflexes.

  “I’ve never been in a lift that did that before,” Paul commented, as he set the flustered girl back on her feet. “Now you’re going to think that the Stryx can’t do any better than that first elevator you took at sixteen.”

  “I was sick after that elevator ride, though it might have been nerves,” the girl admitted. “It was my chance to compete in the regional finals for classical dance, but I could barely keep my balance when I got off the elevator. After that, my parents stopped paying for dance lessons and I started learning to be a seamstress, like my mother.”

  “But you must have attended a good school,” Paul said, though he didn’t have the faintest notion what the education system in old India might be like. “Your English is perfect, and EarthCent recruits such a small number of candidates for the diplomatic corps.”

  “Tutor bots were free in India,” Aisha told him. “The children in the bigger towns still attend real schools with human teachers, but in country villages, the language, math and science courses are taught by tutor bots, or tutor boxes, really. They’re mass-produced on an orbital, and though nobody likes to admit it, the whole curriculum is programmed by the Stryx. My people are proud, but nobody could argue with the price.”

  “I wonder why it’s taking so long to get there,” Paul wondered out loud, then it struck him that Aisha might think he meant she was boring him. “I meant, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a lift ride this long, and I’ve been from one end of the station to the other.”

  As if responding to his complaint, the door slid open, and the two humans were greeted with the strangest scene either had ever encountered. Rolling out before them was a lush carpet of grass, framed by sculptured hedges and rows of trees. Geometrical patterns of flowerbeds were distributed symmetrically around the white pebble paths, which followed the deck’s curvature up into the ceiling. It was perfect and awful at the same time.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Aisha asked Paul as she grabbed his elbow, spooked by the view.

  “I can’t quite say, but it bothers my eyes,” Paul replied. “There’s the party, anyway. I never thought some folding tables with cheap plastic tablecloths would look better to me than a park, but they do.”

  As they approached the group of attendees, a Drazen male turned towards them and spoke. “Welcome, young humans. I believe I recognize the son of my ambassadorial colleague, and the lovely young lady must be the new EarthCent diplomat. I am Bork, the Drazen ambassador.”

  “Thank you for greeting us,” Aisha replied, accepting the Drazen’s warm handshake. “I am Aisha Kapoor, substituting for Ambassador McAllister tonight.”

  “Have you noticed anything strange about this place?” the Drazen asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  “It bothers me somehow,” Paul replied. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I would come here again myself, but of course, I didn’t pay for the fundraiser tickets.”

  “Nobody would come here after a first visit,” Bork informed them cheerfully. “The fundraiser isn’t for the rent, it’s to pay for tearing out all of these abominable plantings and replacing them with something natural.”

  “Are they plastic?” Aisha asked in wonder.

  “Just as artificial,” Bork replied in disgust. “There’s a single blade of grass out there, repeated a few billion times. Millions of copies of the same flower, tens of thousands of the exact same bush, thousands of duplicates of that stupid tree. Those cheap Gems bought one of each and cloned them!”

  “The Drazen is right, for a change,” interrupted a tipsy Frunge, an empty glass in his hand. “I am Ambassador Czeros, a good friend to humans. So, where’s the bottle?”

  “I’m Aisha Kapoor and this is Paul McAllister,” Aisha replied to the Frunge ambassador’s greeting. “I’m here in place of Ambassador McAllister, who is away for the week.”

  “I know, I know. No need to be so formal,” the Frunge protested. “Didn’t the Ambassador tell you she always brings wine to these things?”

  “Aren’t those your kids hiding in the shrubbery there?” Bork addressed the Frunge, pointing towards one of the sculpted hedges. The Drazen gave Aisha and Paul an exaggerated wink when the Frunge reflexively looked in the direction indicated by Bork.

  “That’s so funny,” Czeros replied icily when he realized he’d been duped. “Your sense of humor must be greatly improved by drinking our irrigation runoff.”

  Bork’s tentacle raised itself behind his head, a sure sign of bad temper in a Drazen, and Aisha had the sinking feeling that she had somehow precipitated her first diplomatic crisis. She reviewed her scanty EarthCent training in a fraction of a second, but all she could come up with were the scripted encounter games.

  “May I make a suggestion, Ambassador Bork?” she asked the angry Drazen. “Ambassador Czeros is holding an empty glass, and I think he would be very grateful if you filled it for him.”

  Bork stared at the young human in shock for a moment, but then he broke into a wide smile. “Are we playing an EarthCent game, like the one Kelly used to put that little Stryx into a coma?”

  Czeros broke into a gale of creaky laughter. “It is, it is. I believe she wants us to be friends. And here’s where you’re supposed to grab my glass, but I don’t let go.”

  Bork obligingly took a hold of the base of the wine glass and the aliens pulled in opposite directions, causing the thin stem to break with sharp tinking sound. Czeros began to screech dramatically and Bork handed his piece of the glass to Aisha, saying, “But you told me to take it!”

  Aisha’s head swiveled back and forth in confusion, trying to remember if she had read about any similar behavior in Kelly’s reports, but she came up with a blank. The two ambassadors were making such a racket that the others began gathering around, but all of them seemed to be smiling or glanding pleasant odors, so Aisha felt more foolish than nervous. Then she felt Paul’s hand tugging on her bare upper arm.

  “They’re just playing,” he told her. “Let’s get something to eat before it’s all gone. Nobody ever orders enough food for these events. You don’t want to get stuck eating from a platter intended for some species that didn’t show up, because even if it’s not poisonous, it’s not likely to be very good.”

  Aisha allowed herself to be led away to the buffet, which as Paul had warned, was already in the advanced stages of depletion. Providing finger food for a hundred or so attendees from a dozen or more species meant at most a tray or two of suitable comestibles for each humanoid type might be available at the start of the evening. Some species, such as the Drazens, were blessed with cast iron digestive systems that could handle, if not necessarily benefit from, anything they could bring themselves to swallow. Other species, humans included, took their lives in their hands when eating cross-species.

  “Yuck,” Aisha remarked, surveying the wreckage of what had been a mixed fruit platter. “If we had a bit of bread we could soak up the juice, but who knows how many hands have been in it.”

  “Human fruit always goes fast, it seems that most of the aliens can tolerate it,” Paul told her. “It’s the meat that they stay away from, especially cold-cuts, but you rarely get meat unless a lot of humans are expected. Oh, and I forgot that you don’t eat meat anyway.”

  “It’s alright, I can make something for us when we get home,” Aisha replied. “Donna said the fundraiser is only scheduled for an hour, and its only purpose was to sell the high-priced tickets. There aren’t any speeches or anything.”

  “Hey, they have a couple of bottles of beer left on ice,” Paul said, e
agerly grabbing a pair and reading the unfamiliar label. “Brewed and bottled on Union Station by the Earth Ale Consortium. Joe isn’t going to be thrilled with the competition, but we may as well try it, just for the sake of research.” He pushed down on the center of the pop-off cap on each bottle in turn and handed one of the open bottles to Aisha. She looked at it uncertainly.

  “Oh, I didn’t think,” Paul continued. “Is it against your beliefs to drink alcohol?”

  “No, not exactly,” she ventured in reply. “But I never have before, and my mother taught me not to drink anything directly out of the bottle, at least in public.”

  “Here, use one of these,” Paul responded, handing her a highly polished wine glass. “You can tell by the number of clean glasses that a couple of the early arrivals finished off all of the wine.” Aisha continued to hesitate, so Paul took a sip from his own beer and gave her an encouraging smile. “It’s really low alcohol content, Beowulf would turn his nose up at this stuff. But it’s got a nice taste to it and I think you’ll like it.”

  Aisha gave in and began filling the wine glass in her left hand from the bottle held in her right. But she had never poured beer before and didn’t allow for the rapid frothing, so she ended up with a wet wrist and a few tablespoons of beer at the bottom of a glass full of foam.

  “I think there’s something wrong with this beer,” she told Paul, looking critically at the glass.

  “Here, let me try,” Paul offered, just managing to stifle a laugh. He put down his own beer, took a fresh glass, and filled it carefully from Aisha’s bottle. “You have to pour it on an angle, like this, and then it doesn’t foam much. I can tell from the head that the brewers are using forced carbonization, rather than the natural method Joe says is better. Try this.”

  Aisha accepted the glass back from Paul and took a small sip, intending to say something polite, then to surreptitiously leave the rest of the unfinished bottle on a table at the first opportunity. But the beer was a refreshing surprise and it didn’t seem to contain the imminent danger she’d been led to expect.

  “This is very good. Thank you,” she said, rewarding Paul with a smile topped by a foamy moustache.

  “You’ll have to try Mac’s Bones Ale sometime,” Paul told her. Then he spotted somebody approaching over her shoulder and muttered, “Uh oh. Trouble headed this direction.”

  Aisha turned around and saw that the most beautiful woman she had ever witnessed in the flesh had exited the tube lift and was leisurely striding in their direction.

  “Who is she,” Aisha whispered back, wondering why they were suddenly speaking in undertones. Did the super woman have super hearing?

  “That’s Ambassador Atrea, a Vergallian. She came to one of our EarthCent picnics and Joe warned me to stay away from her. By the end of the evening, he had to warn her to stay away from me. The Vergallian high caste women can do funny things with pheromones, and they go through men like a dog goes through bones.”

  Aisha’s eyes went wide at Paul’s story, and the mental image of a stunning woman chasing men around the yard, chewing them up and burying their bodies in hastily dug graves, prevented her from preparing something to say to the ambassador.

  “Well, well. What have we here?” Atrea drawled in a provocative tone, or at least, that’s what the translation implants made of it.

  “Ambassador Atrea,” Paul replied first, since Aisha was momentarily tongue-tied. “May I introduce Aisha Kapoor, the newest addition to the EarthCent embassy?”

  The Vergallian ambassador slowly looked Aisha up and down, as if she were committing every one of the girl’s salient features to memory.

  “It appears that I finally have some competition on this station,” Atrea broke the silence languidly. “Have you any special talents I need to be aware of, or are you just a pretty young face in a gorgeous red dress.”

  “It’s a sari, not a dress,” Aisha replied, wondering where she found the courage to speak so sharply to an alien who oozed superiority from every pore. “And I dance, if that’s any of your business.”

  “Ah, the tiger cub has teeth,” the ambassador replied, displaying her own perfect ivories in a stunning smile. “And what is the tiger cub’s escort doing this fine evening? Is he performing a duty from which he may be excused in time for a nightcap?”

  Despite the acutely uncomfortable situation, Aisha couldn’t help wondering what creature from the Vergallian worlds the translation implant had rendered as “tiger cub.” She had been obsessed with the meanings and emotional tone of words since childhood, and she secretly suspected that her aptitude for linguistics was what had gotten her into EarthCent. Then she sensed Paul shifting uncomfortably at her side and mumbling something about somebody being warned, so she forced herself to focus.

  “It just so happens that this ‘tiger cub’ and her escort are living together in the same den,” Aisha spoke with a brazenness that was all bluff, taking Paul’s arm at the same time. “And speaking of home, it’s about time we returned there. Paul?”

  “Ta, ta,” Atrea responded, adding an exaggerated wave before she turned away to look for fresh meat.

  Aisha was trembling as she led Paul back to the lift tube, but she nodded polite greetings to everybody they passed, as the young man kept shaking his head as if he needed to clear his brain. When they entered the lift, it was Aisha who spoke the destination before self-consciously releasing Paul’s arm and putting a little distance between them.

  “Joe was right about that woman,” Paul broke the silence ruefully. “Did you know that the Vergallians are actually the closest humanoid type to humans, and they planned on adding us to their empire back before the Stryx opened Earth?”

  “I think she was perfectly awful,” the girl replied, then found herself thrown into Paul’s arms when the lift made a sudden lurch. The two were a little slower at disentangling themselves than they had been when the same thing happened on the trip out.

  “I’ll have to report this lift problem to Gryph,” Paul said mechanically to cover for his embarrassment. “It never happened even once in the whole time I’ve been on the station, then twice in one night?”

  “You should do that,” Aisha agreed quickly, putting as much space between their warm bodies as possible.

  The ride was mercifully short this time, and when they got back to the ice harvester, Aisha’s idea of preparing a meal for the two of them went unmentioned.

  “You know, I think I’ll just return to my lab for a bit. It’s early and I have a lot of work to do,” Paul said apologetically before fleeing.

  So Aisha prepared dinner for herself, and when she rose from her favorite reading chair a few hours later to go to bed, Beowulf got up and followed her into the room. There her self-appointed guardian sprawled out on the rug and immediately went back to sleep.

  Five

  Despite Shaun’s protests that his ship was perfectly capable of landing safely on a planet with an atmosphere, Joe was skeptical. The original hull of the Leprechaun, which was of an obsolete alien manufacture, would have held up if Shaun hadn’t nearly doubled the living space with additions over the years. The lack of aerodynamic engineering made no difference in the vacuum of space. But when it came to landing on a planet, even if the direct energy conversion webbing plastered over the modified hull successfully dissipated the reentry heat, the ship might prove uncontrollable or simply break apart under atmospheric stresses.

  Jeeves agreed with Joe, so the Leprechaun was parked in orbit over Kasil and the Crick family transferred to the Nova. Kelly suspected that the real issue for Shaun was that he was losing all of the cargo space for treasures that his own ship offered, limiting his haul to what would fit in the now cramped interior of the tug. There were only two proper seats on the Nova’s bridge, and Kelly gave hers up to Shaun as a consolation prize.

  Planning ahead, Joe had covered the floor of the Nova’s technical deck with a super-sized military surplus air assault mattress. The multi-layer inflatable device pro
vided cushioning for soldiers making planetary insertions in cargo craft without proper seating, and doubled as an airbag should the landing turn into a crash. Dorothy and Kevin spent most of the descent attempting to jump up and down in the middle, trying to overcome the deceleration force. Kelly sat on the edge of the mattress with her eyes closed, hyperventilating into an air-sick bag, and she barely reacted when the propulsion system cut out and the ship stopped trembling.

  “We’re here!” Shaun declared, sliding down the ladder to the technical deck like an overeager schoolboy. “Joe couldn’t get anybody on the comms and Jeeves said that the entire spectrum was quiet, so he’s popped out for a quick look around to make sure it’s safe.”

  “Everything is fine,” Becky spoke confidently. “I just received a sort of waking vision and they’re sending a welcoming delegation. I guess the historical records were right and we landed at the proper place for visitors.”

  “Jeeves says we can drop the ramp now,” Metoo reported from above the mattress, where he had floated throughout the landing as a sort of lifeguard for the amateur trampoline artists. “And he says to bring your voice boxes because Kasilians really have stopped using implants.”

  Shaun found the controls to open the main hatch, which also served as a ramp, and the adults and older children shouldered their pre-packed knapsacks before exiting onto the ancient concrete tarmac. Joe instructed the ship to secure itself, then fell in at the back of the column headed by Shaun, which was hiking in the direction of the rising sun. Dorothy and Kevin ran ahead, shepherded by Metoo, and Kelly fell back to talk with Joe.

  “Who put him in charge?” Joe asked sourly, lifting his chin in the direction of Crick family patriarch.

  “He’s just following Metoo like the rest of us,” Kelly placated Joe. “If anybody is in charge, it’s Jeeves, since he’s the one who told Metoo where to herd the children. Don’t be surprised if the Stryx talk to you directly over your implants, I gave them permission for the three of us.”