Carnival On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 5) Read online

  “We may as well keep the Effterii as our ace in the hole,” Clive replied thoughtfully. “If they’re suspicious about a tug without a jump drive appearing out of nowhere, we can always blame it on you, Jeeves.”

  “Will you be able to communicate with the Effterii from the surface of the planet?” Thomas asked.

  “I think so,” Clive replied. “As long as I’ve got the Key, it doesn’t seem to matter how far away I am. The way the ship explained it, the Key is a sort of a sympathetic crystal and its mate is built into the Effterii’s brain. Maybe it uses quantum coupling like the Stryx controllers, I didn’t really understand.”

  None of the travelers could actually have explained why they were floating about the crowded bridge rather than remaining strapped into their seats. It was just something you did after a jump. Of the five, Thomas had the least practice moving about in Zero-G, but unlike the humans, he had bought an upgrade for his feet, so he didn’t need magnetic cleats to walk on the deck, or any other surface for that matter.

  “We’re going to look like a bunch of nut jobs on the comm screen,” Clive commented, observing his team. “Everybody holding onto something? Paul, can you ease us out?”

  “Just takes a nudge from the nav jets,” Paul reported. But he buckled himself back into the pilot’s chair to be safe, and then took them out of the Effterii’s hold with a series of small bumps.

  “Hmm,” Jeeves mused. “I’d think we must have appeared on their radar as soon as we cleared the hold, but I’m not picking up any signals activity on the surface.”

  “Maybe nobody’s watching the store,” Woojin suggested. “Best detection technology in the galaxy isn’t worth much if you turn off the alarms and go to a party.”

  “I’m going to try waking them up,” Clive said. “How do I open a general broadcast channel on this thing, Paul?”

  “Here, I’ll do it,” Paul said, tapping the command pad on the central console. “We’re knocking, let’s see if anybody answers the door.”

  A minute went by. Then two minutes, then five.

  “Any signs of trouble down there, Jeeves?”

  “Nothing obvious,” the Stryx replied. “Place is crawling with biologicals, if you’ll pardon the expression, though they seem to be spread pretty thin, no major concentrations.”

  “Should we just land?” Paul asked Clive, who was officially in command of the mission.

  “Why don’t we do a couple low orbits first, learn what we can from space. I’m tempted to call the Effterii down closer to scan for defensive systems, give us a head-start when we talk to their people.”

  “I can do that for you,” Jeeves offered matter-of-factly. “There’s the typical radar net that should have triggered a response by now since it’s bouncing off us even as I speak. Let’s see, some automated anti-asteroid emplacements on satellites, standard stuff that probably came with the contract for the planet. Nope, that’s it for this hemisphere anyway. Maybe there’s something around the other side.”

  Thirty minutes later, it was apparent that Kibbutz didn’t have anything on the surface that could stop an aggressive raid, much less a Gem military vessel. Just when Clive was about to give up on raising a response from the surface, the main viewer came on. A young boy wearing a crudely woven straw hat and homespun clothing that was colored with a pale blue dye squinted at them critically.

  “Who are you?” he asked in English.

  “We’re from EarthCent,” Clive replied. “We’re here to talk to your government.”

  “Don’t got one,” the boy replied. “My Pa is milking now, but I can get him for you after if you want.”

  Clive looked at Paul and made a subtle cut-throat gesture up around his chest.

  “Volume off,” Paul said. “I don’t think the kid is joking.”

  “I know it’s supposed to be an agrarian paradise, but does it make sense that they’d turn their spaceport into a farm?” Woojin asked.

  “I’m good with children,” Thomas said. “Let me try.”

  Clive shrugged and Paul tapped the pad on the console.

  “What’s your name?” Thomas asked the boy.

  “Brian,” he replied sulkily. He had seen their lips moving and knew they had been talking behind his back without even getting him to turn around first.

  “How old are you, Brian?” Thomas followed up.

  “I’m nine,” the boy replied, becoming interested in the conversation. “And my birthday is next week!”

  “Maybe we can bring you a birthday present,” Thomas continued. “Is there something special you want?”

  The boy thought for a moment, and then he asked, “Space stuff?”

  “Sure, if your parents allow it,” the artificial person replied.

  “Never mind,” the boy said sourly. “So, are you coming to visit, or are you just going to sit up there in orbit and make fun of us, like most of the other ships that stop by?”

  “We’d like to come visit,” Thomas answered, with a glance at Clive. “Do you know where we can land?”

  “Right here is the only place with ramps and stuff, though I guess you can land anywhere if you got your own,” the boy responded. “Pa charges fifty creds a day to use the old spaceport. Don’t scorch any of the fields on the edges or he’ll be mad.”

  “I think we can manage that,” Paul cut in on the conversation. “How close to the landing field are you?”

  “I’m right in front of it, in the tower,” Brian replied. “Can’t you see it out the windows behind me?”

  The humans all stared, and sure enough, now that the boy mentioned it, they could see that the view through the dirty windows behind him was of a large expanse of broken concrete. The faint sound of clanging came over the comm and the boy jumped out of his seat.

  “I gotta go,” he said hastily. “See you later, maybe.”

  As Brian moved out of the picture, Jeeves said, “Allow me.” The image changed suddenly, replaced by a bird’s eye view of the old spaceport, centered on a tilting control tower that looked like it was built on shock absorbers. A small boy ran out the bottom and sprinted between the arrays of randomly pointed solar panels in the direction of a human figure, which was carrying something in its hand. The image zoomed in further and they saw it was a girl with a large hand-bell.

  “Breakfast time, I reckon,” Woojin declared with a grin, showing off his mastery of the old English vernacular. “Maybe my years of watching those Western movies is finally going to pay off.”

  “I don’t remember cowboys being socialists,” Paul objected.

  “I’ve read some of that history,” Clive ventured, not mentioning that he had read it recently while trying to catch up with the childhood education he had missed. “Some of the native tribes were pretty communal.”

  “Ahem,” Jeeves said, zooming the image back out. Most of the disused spaceport was surrounded by scrub, but the end near the abandoned control tower showed a patchwork of pasture, along with some smaller fields that featured rows of plantings. A long, low, cow shed entered the picture not far from the house, but as Jeeves continued zooming out, nothing of interest came into view until the house and shed looked like game pieces. At that point, another homestead appeared, but it must have been a brisk hour’s walk from the first.

  “Can there be such a thing as antisocial socialists?” Thomas asked.

  “Probably,” Clive replied, “I doubt that’s the case here, though. Let’s take a couple more spins around the planet before landing, Paul. Maybe there’s a bigger concentration of people somewhere, even if it’s just a village.”

  Nine

  Kelly left Samuel at home for her second face-to-face with the clones. The meeting took place at the end of the workday on the former Gem ag deck undergoing conversion to a parkland, and when she stepped out of the lift tube, the ambassador was momentarily taken aback by the thousands of clones tramping in her direction out of the gently curving fields.

  “Over here,” called the green-hair
ed Gem leader, who had obviously been waiting for her. Kelly gladly moved away from the lift tubes, and after a brief greeting, the clone led her off on a trodden dirt path. “We prepared a place in the fields so nobody can come upon us by surprise,” the woman said.

  Kelly keyed on the external voice box she’d borrowed from EarthCent’s first-contact supplies and subvoced, “I have brought our translation device so we can speak freely today.”

  “It isn’t a Stryx?” the Gem asked suspiciously.

  “No, it’s just a machine,” Kelly reassured her. “But that is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, and maybe it’s best we get it out of the way before we reach your sisters. You’ve explained to me that you’ve been lied to all your lives and don’t know who to trust, but I want to assure you that the Stryx are not allies of the Gem.”

  “The Empire has used the tunnel network since the beginning,” the Gem replied angrily.

  “The Stryx allow everybody who plays by their rules access to the tunnels,” Kelly replied. “They don’t want to tell biologicals how to run their worlds, and even on the stations, they try not to interfere with our internal affairs. But I know for a fact that they’ve told your sisters in the Empire that the Free Gem on the stations can’t be touched.”

  The Gem didn’t reply immediately, but neither did she look convinced, so Kelly tried again.

  “The Stryx will only interfere with a species on the tunnel network if it attempts to enslave or eradicate other civilizations,” Kelly explained. “The Gem civil wars and your current Empire are seen as internal Gem affairs, and the Stryx respect that you are mature biologicals capable of making your own decisions. Do you want the Stryx to start picking your leaders for you like they do for—er, do you?”

  “Like who?” the green-haired Gem inquired. “Are there species the Stryx treat like children?”

  Kelly blushed and mumbled something about her big mouth under her breath. An awkward silence ensued.

  “It’s complicated,” the human ambassador subvoced finally, the external voice box translating her words fluently. “Humans don’t really have leaders beyond our home world these days, we’re basically guests most places in the galaxy. The Stryx sort of pick the new employees for EarthCent, like I was recruited over twenty years ago, and we aren’t really in charge of that much. But everybody goes along with it because we owe the Stryx for gifting us with interstellar space travel before we developed it ourselves. It’s similar with the other species the Stryx have fostered.”

  “But why you and not us?” the Gem insisted.

  “Because the Stryx decided we were too stupid to manage things for ourselves,” Kelly admitted. “They determined that we were on the verge of global economic collapse that would have led to such terrible conditions that we would likely have gone extinct. And remember, we weren’t on the tunnel network at the time, so it’s a different set of rules.”

  “I understand now,” the clone replied. “Some of our political indoctrination referred to humans as Stryx pets, but I assumed it was anti-human propaganda.”

  “The important thing that I want you to understand is that you can trust the Stryx,” Kelly continued, wincing at the characterization of humanity. “They may not help you in your struggle against your sisters, I can’t speak for them any more than I can speak for the other species. But I promise you they aren’t in cahoots with the Gem military either.”

  “I will explain to my sisters who will pass along your message so we can all come to a decision,” the woman replied. The path through the high grasses emerged into an opening, where a small group of Gem waited around a crude picnic table. “I have been chosen to represent us on Union Station, but there are many other sisters who are older and wiser than I who must be consulted, and it takes time to communicate with all of the different locations.”

  Kelly noted that there were six mugs on the picnic table, and that one of the Gems had activated the heater tab at the bottom of a field-urn as the EarthCent ambassador approached with their leader. Kelly gave the green-haired Gem a chance to bring her sisters up-to-date on their conversation, and was suddenly overwhelmed by the smell of hot chocolate. Things were looking up.

  “You didn’t bring your son,” the young clone she knew as Waitress Gem addressed her disappointedly.

  “No, the children are with their father today,” Kelly explained.

  “You share the children with your pollinator?” a different clone exclaimed in astonishment.

  “My what?” Kelly asked, before figuring out what the Gem intended and supplying the proper term. The clones all burst out in gales of laughter, which made her wonder if there was a problem with the translation box. “What’s so funny?”

  “You just said that your husband is equipped with a Gvert,” Waitress Gem choked out when she finally caught her breath.

  “My implant didn’t translate that last word, so it must be a proper name of sorts,” Kelly subvoced the reply, which was translated into Gem by the voice box.

  “It’s a sort of micro-manipulator used in the cloning process,” the young Gem replied. “It’s also a derogatory way to refer to males in general.”

  “Oh,” Kelly said, making a mental note to leave this part of the story out when she told Joe about her day. “Is that hot chocolate you’re making?”

  The Gem leader motioned the ambassador to take a seat at the crude picnic table, and the rest of the clones settled in as well, though Kelly noticed that they didn’t move with the eerie synchronicity she had come to expect from clones. Waitress Gem appointed herself the official hot chocolate pourer, perhaps a holdover from her previous job or because she was the youngest present.

  “Thank you, Waitress Gem,” Kelly said, wrapping her hands around the mug, which was just beginning to warm itself from the hot chocolate.

  “I have a real name now,” the young clone informed the ambassador. “I’m Gwendolyn.”

  “Gwendolyn,” Kelly repeated. “I’m glad to have such a lovely name to call you by now. Have the rest of you taken names as well?”

  “I’m Matilda,” the leader told her, and the remaining three clones sounded off proudly, like they were announcing their presence on a parade ground.

  “Sue!”

  “Sarah!”

  “Betsy!”

  “It’s very nice to meet you all again, Sue, Sarah, Betsy, Matilda and Gwendolyn,” the ambassador said warmly. There was something familiar about the names chosen by the Gem but she couldn’t quite make the connection. “It will be much easier for me to talk with you now that you’ve taken individual names. How did you choose them?”

  “Mist gave them to us,” Betsy explained. “She’s been full of ideas lately.”

  “That’s a funny coincidence. My daughter has a new friend named…,” Kelly cut herself off mid-sentence. The Free Gem leadership was named after the dolls in Dorothy’s collection, and the ambassador wasn’t sure that there would ever be a right time to tell them.

  “We’ve been busy planning since our last meeting with you,” Matilda continued, not noticing that Kelly was suddenly struggling against pent-up laughter. “It is a slow process since we have to use couriers and coded messages, but if my sisters agree to trust the Stryx, maybe we will move to their encrypted communications network.”

  “Encryption is expensive,” Kelly cautioned the Free Gem leader. “And you have to make sure that there aren’t any bugs in the rooms at either end, or it doesn’t help. I’ve learned something about operational security lately, and it’s better not to say things out loud if you can avoid it.”

  “I was trained in Gem Internal Security before I left,” Matilda told her, holding out a finger. A small creature that looked like a cross between a hummingbird and a bat came streaking out of nowhere and landed, its feet gripping the clone’s digit. “Our micro-raptors are designed to destroy parrot-flies and to inform us of anything else that approaches the perimeter. We have atmospheric superiority on this deck.”

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p; The clone named Sue glanced briefly at a bracelet studded with what appeared to be colored glass beads on her wrist. “The deck remains electromagnetically shielded, either as a function of its construction or through Stryx interference,” she said. “If anybody is listening in, they are using technology beyond the Empire’s state-of-the-art. And the Gem Empire has no allies.”

  “But the Empire participated in our trade show for spy hardware,” Kelly protested. “Do you mean to say that they are sellers but never buyers?”

  “Haven’t you met with our local ambassador?” Sue replied. “The Empire Gem are incapable of admitting that our technology is inferior. To purchase from other species something that we produce ourselves would be unthinkable.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” Kelly admitted.

  “We have made some progress with the Farlings in negotiating for the restoration of our original genetic lines,” Matilda reported. “Of course, it will take generations to reestablish our diversity, and that can only happen after we have thrown off the tyrants, but our unborn sisters, our unborn children, will include four hundred and twenty individuals of our species.”

  “Just four hundred and twenty?” Kelly asked before she could stop herself. She hoped that the Gem wouldn’t take her question as criticism.

  “It is all the Farlings have on file,” Matilda replied. “Their scientists assure us that if we reestablish natural breeding after new generations of these individuals are cloned for a starter population, we can achieve viability as a multi-individual species. This seems logical to us as we have managed so long as a single individual.”

  “What led you to break away from the Empire, if I may ask?” Kelly inquired. “I’ve been put in charge of a group of concerned ambassadors from some of the other species who have an interest in the future of the Gem. They report that the Empire is going through an economic upheaval, but details are sketchy.”