Wanderers On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 6) Read online

  “Signs of a devastating war,” the Frunge repeated. “I like that. I’ll have to add it to the story.”

  “You’re making this up?” Lynx asked, struggling to contain her frustration.

  “Storytellers don’t make up stories, just details,” the Frunge replied with a certain dignity. “So the kids take the shuttle down to the surface, and for some reason I’ll never understand, I agreed to go along for the ride. The next thing I know, I’m in a full environmental suit, staggering along behind these two idiots. The visor keeps fogging up because it was freezing out, and never having worn one before, I didn’t know about the defrost. Still, it was something to see, an incredible ceramic city that stretched on forever. There weren’t any tall buildings, but the streets were laid out like a grid, and looking down any of them, the view didn’t change all the way to the horizon. That’s why it didn’t look like much from space, because the whole surface was built up the same way.”

  “I know somebody who would love to visit a world like that,” Lynx commented, thinking of Clive. “Do you have the galactic coordinates?”

  “There’s probably a record on that ship’s controller, but they left the mob after that, so your guess is as good as mine,” the Frunge croaked complacently. “Now stop interrupting, I’m getting to the good part. These kids had brought some kind of detection device, sort of a hand-held treasure hunter’s special that scans for all kinds of elements and compounds. We aren’t on the surface a half an hour, and they’ve collected more ceramic doo-dads than they can carry. I asked what’s so special about these, the place is littered with the stuff, you see, and they tell me that they’re tools of some kind. Well, I was exhausted by this point and I made sure they knew it, so we go back to the shuttle and return to the explorer ship.”

  “Didn’t you say that the signal warned against touching anything?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s an old prospector trick, setting up a repeater with a message claiming that some place or another is a galactic historical site under Stryx protection,” the old Drazen male answered for the Frunge, who looked quite winded.

  “How can you tell a real warning from a fake one?” Thomas asked.

  “The Stryx will let you know eventually if you guess wrong,” the Drazen replied.

  “So, you robbed a historical site and came back with a black hole weapon,” Lynx summarized.

  “By the time we returned to the explorer with the artifacts, the girl’s father had cracked the password on the ship controller, and if his daughter hadn’t been on the shuttle with us, we would have been left behind,” the old Frunge continued. “Pzorat and the girl lock themselves in the ship’s lab and start running all kinds of tests on the artifacts, trying to get them to do something. Crazy kids. I took a nap, and when I woke up, the evacuation alarms were going off and I thought everybody had abandoned ship and left me behind. But it turned out that the kids weren’t as dumb as they looked, because when those tools began showing signs of life, they dumped them all in the shuttle and sent it off to a safe distance, watching the artifacts over a comm link.”

  “How did they know what a safe distance was?” Thomas asked.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” the old Frunge snapped. “Anyway, the whole collection of artifacts drew together and began to shrink, never saw anything like it in my life. Then bits and pieces of the shuttle’s cabin began flying through the air and sticking to that mass, and they just sort of flattened out. Pretty soon, the hull of the shuttle began to buckle, and before the comm link failed, we saw that everything was vanishing into a sort of a singularity. When the shuttle disappeared from our sensors, we jumped out of there and back to the fleet.”

  “That’s it?” Lynx demanded. “You violated a Stryx warning, stole artifacts from a historical galactic site, and triggered them to do something without a clue about what you were playing with?”

  “The character development needs more work,” the Frunge admitted. “I should play up the romance angle.”

  “Were you even really along on the trip?” she asked.

  “I knew somebody who was,” the Frunge said defensively. “Audiences usually prefer first-person tellings.”

  “Does anybody have a story about strategic threats or AI running wild that doesn’t involve the Wanderers stealing something?” Lynx inquired icily.

  “I could tell them my story about how the commune joined the mob,” Monos said.

  “Not that again,” the old Drazen moaned. Several of the other elders ostentatiously put their heads on the table or got up and wandered off.

  “It happened at Kalthair Two,” the human began. “The crew of the Intrepid had formed a commune to share our compensation, a repurposed colony ship we accepted from the Dollnicks in exchange for labor, and we were using it as a base for asteroid prospecting. Exploring for minerals in a vacuum is hard work, dangerous, and although we had located valuable resources, we lacked the capital to exploit them. Also, the original commune members were feeling their age.”

  “So are we,” the elderly Drazen leader interjected. “Now hurry up with it so we can all go home and take a nap.”

  “When the Phygorean mob began arriving at Kalthair Two, the commune was just beginning to break up. There were continual arguments over work assignments and the division of recreational resources, and twenty years of slaving together for the Dollnicks wasn’t the best preparation for self-government. I was on the first committee to visit the Wanderer fleet, and we were all impressed by what we saw. Unfortunately, there weren’t any humans with the mob, so the only way we could join was by bringing our own place to live, and we only had the shared colony ship.”

  “And you couldn’t steal it because it was full of commune members,” Lynx guessed.

  “There was that,” Monos admitted, “but there was also the problem with our work habits. The Wanderers don’t have many rules—actually, I take that back, but they aren’t the kind of rules you’d expect. The biggest rule is that you can’t join the mob if you’re going to spend most of your time working just to stay alive, because that just kills the mood for everybody. And the refit of the Intrepid the Dollnicks had done before handing it over was just enough to let us survive in it. Most of our labor went into growing food and doing routine maintenance. It’s one of the reasons we weren’t getting rich from the mining claim.”

  “But you did join with the Intrepid,” Thomas objected. “We passed it on the way here.”

  “So we were between a rock and a hard place,” the old human continued, ignoring the interruption. “The mob was only going to be around for a few months, and even if we stopped mining and worked on the ship around the clock, we didn’t have the tools or the technical skills to bring it up to Wanderer automation standards. We tried listing it on the galactic trade exchange, hoping to swap the Intrepid and the mining claim with humans who had a much smaller colony ship that was in better shape, or even just a decent space habitat without a jump drive.”

  “Did you ever take a vote about this, or did some of you just decide for the others?” Lynx asked.

  “We voted,” Monos replied. “It might have been a close thing, but one of our shuttles returning from the mines had recently been destroyed in a freak accident. It ran into fragments from an unexpected collision between a couple of asteroids. It really was a dangerous place to work.”

  “But how did the Intrepid get upgraded?” Thomas persisted.

  “So the only answer that resulted from our advertisement was from a consortium calling itself the Helper AI,” the storyteller continued. “They claimed they could upgrade our colony ship to completely automate the farming and maintenance functions, and all they wanted in return was a quitclaim deed for our mines. We took the deal, and the next thing we knew, an enormous hive ship jumped in. I’ve never seen anything like it before and hope I never will again.”

  “What’s a hive ship,” Lynx asked.

  “Looks like it sounds,” Monos replied. “Picture a termite mound for inse
cts that work in metal, multiply it by a few billions or trillions, and hope that it doesn’t bite. The thing made our Dollnick ship look like a beauty contest winner. It was pure function, just a big ball of robot drones and a place to put them. We were so scared of the thing that we would have backed out of the deal if we could have, but those robots were swarming all over the Intrepid before we had time to act. Big robots, little robots, working around the clock, never saying a word. The whole job took them less than three weeks.”

  “So the hive took over your mining claim and you were able to join the Wanderers,” Thomas concluded.

  “That’s right,” the old man said. “Those drones even fixed up all the empty living space that we’d never gotten around to converting from Dollnick use to human. Can’t say anything bad about their work, even the commune members who never wanted the deal had to admit it was a bargain. But for three weeks, those robots must have outnumbered us by hundreds or thousands to one. This was outside of Stryx space, you know, and if the hive queen or whatever AI was running the show had decided to get rid of us and take the ship along with the mine, we would have been dead.”

  “It’s not much of a story,” the old Drazen male said with a yawn. “There wasn’t a single axe in the whole thing.”

  The remaining storytellers took the conclusion of the human’s story as a signal that the session was at an end, and they began to rise and head home for their naps.

  “Thank you,” Lynx said to Monos. “That’s just the sort of thing we were interested in hearing about. Do you have any others?”

  “I think you’re a little confused about what storytellers do, young lady,” the old human said, struggling to his feet with an assist from Thomas. “Current events are not our thing, too easy to check the facts. You never would have gotten in the door here if the old witch hadn’t taken a shine to your pretty-boy pal.”

  “Bond,” Thomas said to Lynx, as they headed back towards the taxi stand. “James Bond.”

  Nine

  “Welcome to the first broadcast of Sentients Match Wits.”

  Kelly spoke directly to the middle holo-camera, which floated in front of the studio audience. It was hard not to think about the fact that billions of viewers could be watching the live broadcast, and that hundreds of billions more might consume it on demand. Given how the length of the day varied across the species, it was a wonder that anybody watched anything live anymore. Something blurred in the ambassador’s vision, and she noticed the frantic Grenouthian director jumping up and down in front of the studio audience.

  “We thought it would be fun to launch our show with a guest panel from the diplomatic community,” Kelly continued in a rush, trying to make up for the time she had spaced out. “In the future, we’ll be choosing panels from the studio audience, so don’t forget to ping us at SMW, care of Union Station, for an opportunity to be on the show. Oh, and I’m EarthCent Ambassador Kelly McAllister, if I didn’t mention that already.”

  The Grenouthian director covered his eyes with his hands and sat on the floor, making Kelly wonder if refusing the teleprompts-via-implant option had been a wise choice. The whole opening spiel had been a last-minute idea of the Grenouthian producer, who thought that starting right in with introducing the panels would be too abrupt. Well, they were going to find out.

  “Let me introduce the two teams of ambassadors who will be facing off today, starting with the short species.” Kelly winced on realizing she had mistakenly used the informal description of the team that she and Aisha had come up with in their practice sessions. “Drazen Ambassador Bork, Frunge Ambassador Czeros, and myself.”

  Hearing Kelly make the introductions, the technical director swapped to the camera feeds for the “short” panel, where the make-up crew were still applying last-minute touches. Neither of the ambassadors in question realized that they were live. Czeros could be seen taking a slug from a bottle of wine, while a Grenouthian stylist was trying to stuff Bork’s tentacle inside the back of his jacket.

  “The, uh, other team consists of Dollnick Ambassador Crute, Verlock Ambassador Srythlan, and Grenouthian Ambassador, er, I never did get your name, sir,” Kelly concluded lamely. She could just imagine that the first minute of the show would be preserved for all time in entertainment industry training schools as an example of what happens when amateurs try to adlib.

  “Just Ambassador,” the Grenouthian said coldly. Kelly almost hit herself on the forehead right in front of everybody. How could she forget that the Grenouthians kept their names secret for fear of losing their souls?

  “I’ll take my place, then,” Kelly said, moving to occupy the empty seat between Bork and Czeros. The technical director switched holo-streams several times, from tracking the host’s progress, to the tittering studio audience, and back again to the other ambassadors. It seemed to take minutes for Kelly to install herself in place, an action that had been scheduled for the commercial break after her forgotten monologue, but in reality, it only took around thirty seconds. The Grenouthian producer crouched in the corner of the control booth, whimpering.

  “Before we begin the first round, I should point out that the questions we’ll be asked are taken from the school curriculums of the sentients present. Now, please welcome our special guest moderator, Stryx Jeeves,” Kelly concluded, trying to sound as enthusiastic as possible.

  There had been quite a bit of discussion with the Grenouthians about how to avoid the great bugaboo of quiz shows around the galaxy, namely, cheating on the questions. The only solution they could agree upon was turning the moderator job over to the Stryx. Once that had been resolved, Kelly would have been happier with Libby picking the questions, but Jeeves had volunteered, and she couldn’t think of an excuse to bar the mischievous AI from participating.

  “Hello, sentients of the galaxy!” Jeeves blared, arriving center stage between the facing panels with a loud pop. The audience burst into applause for the first time since Kelly had walked onto the stage, and the sudden breeze caused by the Stryx’s short hop or supersonic flight from the wings was a welcome relief under the studio lighting. The robot was improbably dressed in a formal tuxedo tailored to his non-humanoid form, complete with a top hat that featured a wrap-around transparent band, since it covered his sensor array and would have otherwise blocked the visual spectrum. After the applause died out, Jeeves continued.

  “In addition to asking the questions, I’ll be suppressing any attempts by the contestants to consult implant resources or communicate outside of their heads,” Jeeves announced, throwing in a spin move just because he could. “Without further ado, the first question is for Ambassador Crute. On the formerly occupied world of Brupt Minor, the standard mode of communication was telepathy. However, children born without the telepathic facility could be taught to express their thoughts through a loop of string shared and manipulated by two individuals. Demonstrate the method.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kelly whispered to Bork. “I don’t think the Dollnicks even existed yet when the Stryx drove the Brupt from the galaxy.”

  “Just watch,” Bork replied. He sounded more annoyed with the interruption than concerned about the integrity of the show.

  A Grenouthian crew member hopped onto the stage with a large loop of scarlet yarn that he handed to Crute. The Dollnick ambassador casually stretched the loop out between the hands of his upper and lower arms on one side, displayed it to the audience, and then reached over with the hands from the other side, hooking the loop around the wrists. Then he began to move through an intricate set of motions that created, in turn, a cradle, a Brupt Battle sphere, and a Sheezle bug.

  “Phenomenal!” Jeeves exclaimed. “A sentient with sentiment. An ambassador who knows his history. A genuine contribution to the diplomatic ranks!”

  The studio audience clapped and cheered, the Dollnicks making the most noise of all.

  “How did he do that?” Kelly whispered to Bork. Her Drazen friend didn’t even look in her direction.

  “O
ur next question is for Ambassador Czeros, and it involves Verlock history. What was the cause of the great revolt of I’npredas, during the reign of Hrrgeraat the Four-hundred and Sixth?”

  “Why, every schoolchild knows that,” Czeros replied. “The Hrrgeraat rulers on Verlock Prime maintained their grip on power through a monopoly on mercury, a vital nutrient for Verlock children. In the days before the Verlocks developed interplanetary travel, it was thought that all of the mercury sources were located on the Southern continent, but the rebel I’npredas located a new source while investigating the lack of volcanic activity on the hitherto unoccupied Northern land mass. I believe the revolt continued in slow-motion for some ten thousand years, before the Verlocks developed jump drives and the point became moot.”

  “Correct!” Jeeves shouted, pointing his pincer at Czeros. Kelly stared at the Frunge in amazement. It was hard to picture him knowing the answer to anything that didn’t involve wineries or vintages. If these were the kind of questions Jeeves would be asking them all, she was in trouble. The audience applauded again, obviously impressed.

  “This next question is for the Grenouthian Ambassador. The Empire of a Hundred Worlds exceeded that number some millions of years ago, but the Vergallians stuck with the name rather than changing it every time they acquired new real estate. What is the current number of worlds in the Vergallian Empire?”

  “Please clarify whether you are including twinned-planets and ongoing terraforming projects in the count, or just the current number of unique domains as recognized by Vergallian Heralds,” the Grenouthian replied.

  “I’ll take either answer, providing you tell me which it is,” Jeeves said.

  “There are currently two hundred and seventy-one Vergallian domains recognized by their College of Heraldry, and another eighty-nine, if we include twinned worlds, dwarf planets and active terraforming missions,” the Grenouthian ambassador stated confidently.

  “Bingo!” Jeeves hollered, flashing some brilliant emerald lights on his casing that Kelly had never seen in action before. “Correct on both counts.”