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

“My schedule is booked solid through the next cycle,” Crute complained. “I vote we schedule a follow-up meeting right now so the Stryx don’t drag us out of prior commitments again.”

  “Second the motion,” the Chert ambassador spoke out of thin air.

  “Third,” Abeva said. “I’m surprised Ambassador McAllister hasn’t offered to host the meeting. According to the briefing I received from my predecessor, she volunteers as a matter of course.”

  Kelly bit back her immediate reaction, having learned that speaking up at multi-species meetings was a good way to get stuck in charge.

  “Motion is carried,” the Dollnick ambassador declared reluctantly. “I request that my previous and the following statement in no way be construed as a commitment on my part to assume official chairmanship of this committee, a position which I suggest we decide at a meeting point two-zero cycles from today in my embassy. If anybody objects to the timing, you’re welcome to reschedule at your own embassy.”

  Nobody spoke up. In fact, the more fleet-footed ambassadors basically fled the room.

  “A word, Ambassador McAllister,” Kelly heard in a bass rumble as the remaining diplomats rose to exit the room. She turned and saw that Srythlan had remained in his seat. “I would like to continue our previous discussion,” the Verlock ambassador added, and by the time he reached the last word, the room had cleared.

  “Of course, Srythlan. Was there something I can do to help?”

  “The Verlock Trader’s Guild established a compensation fund for purchasers of the VTGERN device when the system was discontinued. My legal advisers inform me that as probationary members of the tunnel network, Humans qualify to file claims for medical expenses and suffering caused by using VTGERN. There is also a refund for the purchase of the device, but that amount goes directly to the Stryx working group, which I understand has taken possession in exchange for waiving the cost of the rescue.”

  “That’s very nice of you to offer, Srythlan. It turns out that two of the people involved are related to the Oxfords, and I understand from Blythe that the medical treatments are going well and the Stryx are picking up the tab.”

  “In that case, the medical compensation money will be paid to the victims in cash,” the Verlock said. “The rules of the fund are quite clear.”

  “I’ll let them know,” Kelly offered. “By the way, can you explain why the Grenouthian ambassador seemed so sympathetic to the pirates?”

  “Grenouthian ships are far too advanced to be troubled by the freebooters, and more importantly, their news networks rely on a certain level of piracy for content. I suspect that pirates play a role in not a few Grenouthian entertainment products as well.”

  “The bunnies get financial backing from the pirates?” Kelly asked in astonishment.

  “I meant that pirates frequently appear as characters in dramas,” Srythlan explained. “I am not a fan of immersive productions myself, but I have sat through a number of premiers from various species in my professional capacity. To the extent that I was able to follow the overwrought action, it appeared to me that most of them relied heavily on piracy to advance the plot.”

  Five

  “Metoo,” Kelly greeted the young Stryx. “Thank you for coming. Go right in. Everybody else is already here.”

  “You’re not participating?”

  “Jeeves said that I would probably go all wobbly and try to stick up for Dorothy. I think he’s right, so I’m going to leave and hide in the embassy.”

  Metoo dipped in acknowledgement and then floated up the ramp into the ice harvester. Jeeves was waiting just inside the door, and the two Stryx engaged in a silent conversation that was over in less than a pico-second. Shaina and Brinda were sitting at the table in the dining area, along with Affie, Flazint, Chance and Blythe. Beowulf stood watch over the two puppies who were sprawled on the rug in front of the couch, fast asleep after a busy morning of mischief.

  “Where is she?” Metoo asked when he reached the table.

  “In the bathroom,” Blythe replied. “Kelly says that she spends half of her life in there now.”

  “It’s really that bad?” Metoo gave a metallic shudder. “I had hoped that Jeeves was exaggerating.”

  “Look at this,” the older Stryx commanded, opening a garment bag and removing what looked like a large black sack draped with crepe. “She was supposed to be working on a new line of vacation frocks and this is what she brought in as a prototype.”

  “Maybe she was thinking about combining vacations with funerals,” Metoo suggested, in defense of his childhood friend. “Humans have limited time and budgets compared to the other species, and I’ve observed that they often mix business with pleasure when they travel.”

  “It’s called an expense account,” Blythe explained, and then raised a finger to her lips and whispered, “Shhh. Here she comes.”

  “Don’t even start on me, Mom,” Dorothy declared combatively as she walked into the room, her eyes so downcast that she didn’t even notice the visitors. “I worked late yesterday so I’m just going to lie down on the couch for a bit.”

  “Hi, Dorothy,” Jeeves said, causing the girl to spin around and trip over one of the sleeping puppies.

  “Did I forget a meeting?” Dorothy asked, rubbing her eyes and surveying the group. “Metoo! What are you doing back on Union Station?”

  “Jeeves invited me. He said you haven’t been yourself lately.”

  “I haven’t been—Blythe! You too?”

  “We’re your friends, Dorothy. Chastity wanted to be here as well, but Marcus got freaked out about the idea of her going out with a six-day-old infant, or even worse, leaving him to babysit.”

  “What is this?” Dorothy asked, trying to back away and finding herself blocked by Beowulf, who had moved into position behind her. Her eyes went wide when the reality hit her, and she practically shrieked, “Are you staging an intervention?”

  “You’re depressed, Dorothy,” Shaina told her firmly. “You’re sleeping all of the time, you’re not eating and losing weight, and you aren’t paying attention to work.”

  “I’m just taking a little break, is all. Am I supposed to be a slave to SBJ Fashions?”

  “You haven’t come out dancing since David left,” Chance said, not hesitating to use the taboo name. “You don’t get any exercise, and Samuel tells me that you haven’t worn high heels in three months.”

  “I get exercise. I played fetch with the puppies just yesterday.”

  “I was at the training camp and I watched you,” the artificial person retorted. “You came down the ramp with a rubber bone, threw it, and then went back inside and closed the door while the puppies ran to get it. You were just getting rid of them, and I had to assign Judith to chase them around the hold for an hour so they wouldn’t interrupt our drills.”

  “Look at this…thing,” Flazint said, indicating the black garment Jeeves had brought along. “Would you really want to see your worst enemy wearing it?”

  “It’s not so bad,” Dorothy protested. “Black is elegant.”

  “I bet Flazint that I could wear it out to a club and still get free drink offers,” Affie said. “I lost. The bartenders at two places even asked me to leave because I was hurting business.”

  “Well, it’s good to have clothes to let people know that you’re sad. We can’t all be happy and perky all the time.”

  “Dorothy, we miss you at work,” Brinda said. “The shoe prototypes haven’t progressed one bit since you broke up…”

  “I don’t care about shoes anymore. I’m going back to bed,” Dorothy declared, but the giant dog refused to let her pass. “Et tu, Beowulf?”

  “Dorothy,” spoke a gentle old voice, and the girl froze in place. “Look at me. I want to talk with you.” The ambassador’s daughter turned reluctantly back to the group and was confronted by a hologram of her grandmother.

  “No fair,” Dorothy muttered, staring daggers at Jeeves.

  “Kelly has told me all about it and yo
u’re behaving like a little girl,” the hologram of Marge continued. “You didn’t want to marry the boy, and now you think you have the right to make everybody else miserable because he was smart enough to marry somebody else? From what I understand, you practically pushed the two of them together.”

  “Why is everybody ganging up on me?” Dorothy cried, and sinking to the floor, she wrapped her arms around one of the sleeping puppies and began to sob.

  “That’s a good girl, let it all out,” her grandmother cooed. “You’re not even twenty-two yet and you have your whole life ahead of you. Just think about all the people who love you and want you to be happy.”

  “But I found him in the lost-and-found and bought him pizza!” Dorothy wailed. “He was mine.”

  “Maybe you were just holding him until his real owner came along to claim him,” Metoo suggested.

  Flazint and Affie exchanged looks, taken back by the display of histrionics, the likes of which they had thought only existed in Earth’s unpopular immersive dramas. Chance went over to Dorothy and began patting her on the back.

  “That’s better,” Marge said. “I have something on the stove so I need to go now. Thank you, Jeeves.” The hologram winked out, and the remaining participants in the intervention looked at each other, uncertain of what to do next.

  “I’ve got to get going too,” Blythe said. “I’m taking Clive’s sister and her boy out to dinner. You’ll meet them at Paul and Aisha’s anniversary party.”

  “Metoo and I have to be, uh, somewhere,” Jeeves said, sounding uncharacteristically subdued. The two Stryx fled the ice harvester as fast as they could without creating sonic booms.

  The Hadad sisters talked quietly with Affie and Flazint while Dorothy bathed the still-sleeping puppy in tears. Eventually, Brinda snuck into the kitchen and made a pot of tea.

  “Is this sort of thing normal with you guys when practice relationships don’t work out?” Affie whispered to the sister who remained.

  Shaina rolled her eyes. “Not so much at her age, but she was pretty young when they started dating, so I guess we can cut her some slack.”

  “I have a hedge friend whose older sister’s engagement fell through after twenty years of negotiations,” Flazint whispered. “She didn’t mist herself for months and her hair vines got all dried out.”

  “I always felt a bit guilty about the whole pheromone control business, but if it saves me from this…” Affie commented.

  Beowulf suddenly stood up and gave a puzzled bark. The puppies came awake in response, and the one who Dorothy had been using as a furry handkerchief rose to his feet and shook himself off, spraying salty tears around him.

  “Ugh,” the artificial person and girl chorused together, and then Dorothy laughed for the first time in months.

  Somebody rapped on the hollow sheet metal of the open hatch with his knuckles, and then a tall young man with rust-colored hair stuck his head into the ice harvester. “Is anybody home?”

  Beowulf bounded up to the man and went into a paroxysm of sniffing and tail-wagging. The puppies likewise took an instant liking to the stranger, competing at jumping up and putting their paws on his shoulders, and taking turns licking his face.

  “Whoa, boys,” the young man protested. “I didn’t think I’d ever see a bigger dog than Beowulf, but I guess Mr. McAllister found one.”

  “Kevin?” Dorothy asked, rubbing her swollen eyes in disbelief. “Kevin Crick?”

  “You remember me,” Kevin said in relief. “I didn’t think you would after fifteen years. You look terrific.”

  “I do?” Dorothy said, shooting a look over at the Hadad sisters, both of whom winked and flashed a thumbs-up sign. “I mean, I just got up. Give me a second to—oh, what am I wearing!”

  The girl fled the room, and Kevin stood in the doorway looking uncertain about what to do next. Chance went over and grabbed his arm to make sure he remained.

  “Sit down. We were just having tea, or at least, they were,” the artificial person said, turning on the charm. “I’m Chance, and I’m one of Dorothy’s best friends. These four are Flazint, Affie, Shaina and Brinda. How do you know Dorothy and Beowulf?”

  “My family camped in the hold to repair our ship when I was seven, and then we went on a vacation to Kasil together.”

  “That’s where I recognize the name from,” Shaina declared. “Brinda and I ran the auction with Jeeves. I remember it was your sister who had the visions that brought the whole thing about.”

  “Becky,” Kevin confirmed. “She ended up going to New Kasil and starting some sort of a religious commune. Most of my family lives there now, but I became an independent trader. Is all of Dorothy’s family still, uh…”

  “Alive?” Chance completed the sentence for him. “Yes. Joe and Paul are out sorting through a mess of alien spacecraft that Paul’s wife bought him, Kelly is at work, and Samuel is either at school or dance practice, though you probably never met him if I’m doing the math right. Beowulf obviously remembers you, and the puppies are his.”

  “I remember Beowulf, but he was older and fatter than this dog,” Kevin replied doubtfully.

  “Oh, he was reincarnated,” Brinda explained. “Beowulf came back as a full-blooded Cayl hound, and I have the only other one on the station, at least until they got together and had the puppies. Do you want one? They seem to like you.”

  “Uh, sure, if they’re okay with Zero G. Not that I have a ship anymore.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Pirates,” Kevin gave the one-word answer. “I escaped with a woman and her son who turned out to be related to some people here on the station.”

  “You’re the guy who showed up with Clive’s sister?” Shaina asked. “But everybody is talking about that. If it wasn’t for the Farling doctor, Clive and his sister never would have known that the other one even existed.”

  “Yeah, her family is really nice. That Clive guy even offered me a job and help setting up as a trader again, though I guess I’m not supposed to talk about that.”

  “You must mean as an EarthCent Intelligence agent,” the Frunge girl guessed. “It’s okay, everybody on the station knows about it. The secret training camp is a few steps from here, and Chance is one of the instructors.”

  “I teach people how to interact with aliens and extract information in social situations,” the artificial person said proudly. “My guy, Thomas, runs the camp now that Joe is retired.”

  Kevin looked from one woman to the next in a sort of a daze, overloaded by the information dump covering everything from canine life-after-death to alien relations.

  “What have you guys been doing to Kevin?” Dorothy demanded, approaching the table. She was now wearing one of the SBJ Fashions tube dresses that she had helped design, high heels, and had somehow found the time to apply enough makeup to partially disguise the fact that her eyes were swollen from crying. “Not telling tales, I hope.”

  “I was just getting him caught up on your family,” Chance replied. “It turns out that Kevin’s the guy who escaped the pirates with the sister Clive didn’t know he had.”

  “He agreed to take a puppy when he gets settled,” Brinda added.

  “That’s great,” Dorothy said, not really listening to the explanations since all of her attention was focused on Kevin. “Are you hungry? I’m famished, and there’s a ton of stuff in the kitchen. Hang on a sec.” Not waiting for a reply, she disappeared again, and Shaina got up to go help.

  “She looks different than five minutes ago,” Kevin commented, unaware of exactly how much of a transformation had taken place. “I guess she must have been up late.”

  “Did you like her dress?” Affie asked. “She designed that one, though I helped with the colors and Flazint did the zipper.”

  “It looked fantastic,” the young man replied, running worryingly low on his store of adjectives. “She works as a fashion designer?”

  “For SBJ Fashions,” Brinda confirmed. That’s ‘S’ for my sister
Shaina, ‘B’ for me, and ‘J’ for Jeeves, but he’s not here.”

  “I remember Jeeves,” Kevin said. “He hung around with Paul. And Dorothy had a Stryx friend from school, Metoo. Is he still around?”

  “You just missed him, but he’s rarely on Union Station these days.”

  “Try my mom’s lasagna,” Dorothy said, placing a tray with two heaping plates of food on the table. “Don’t worry about the others. Shaina is bringing out some sliced fruit for Flazint and Affie, and she and Brinda ate before coming.”

  “How about Miss, uh, Chance?”

  “She’s an artificial person,” Dorothy replied, and then began to shovel food into her mouth like she hadn’t eaten in three months.

  Kevin couldn’t help noticing that the women were eyeing him speculatively, and he tried to cover his embarrassment by beginning to eat, even though he had just come from a late breakfast. The young man had spent a reasonable amount of time around Frunge and Vergallians as an independent trader, and it seemed to him that the two aliens, along with the artificial person and the two older women, were sizing him up for something.

  “So, how have you been?” he asked between bites, bringing some smothered snorts from the others.

  “Pretty good,” Dorothy lied smoothly. “Well, I broke up with my boyfriend a few months ago, but it was no big deal. He eloped with a woman that my mom brought back from Earth to live with us. Do you want to see our office later? We could always use a man’s opinion.”

  Affie rolled her eyes at Flazint, more in reaction to the idea that a male could have anything useful to say about women’s fashion than as a commentary on their friend’s sudden transformation.

  “He eloped with a woman who was staying in your home?” Kevin asked, stopping with a fork halfway between the plate and his mouth. “Sounds like a real jerk.”

  “Oh no, he’s a great guy,” Dorothy insisted. “Hannah was pretty nice too, and she was really good at sewing. I think they made a perfect couple.”

  “He couldn’t dance to save his life, though,” Chance commented.

  “David put up with a lot,” Flazint added, then clamped her hand over her mouth.