Vacation on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 7) (10 page)

“Perfect,” the would-be Horten replied with a grin.

“Alright. Everybody grab your plastic cup and queue up for a beer,” Chance instructed. “I’m going inside to get a bottle of grain alcohol for me and some fruit juice for fake mixed drinks. And remember, there’s no such thing as morning in the spy business.”

As the unnamed period before lunch wore on, the volume of the conversations taking place steadily increased until some of the trainees were practically shouting. Chance and Thomas each strolled independently among the tables, listening in for a few minutes here, offering a suggestion there, but on the whole, they allowed the recruits to find their own way. After two hours, Thomas and Paul returned the much-lighter keg to the brew room.

“Time’s up,” Chance announced, clapping her hands loudly to get their attention. “Settle down, settle down. We have a little time before we break for lunch, and I want to get your feedback on this exercise and how you did with it while the impression is still fresh. Does anybody think they figured out the cargo of the person they talked to?”

All of the recruits raised a hand.

“Cool,” Chance said. “Did any of you cheat and check if you were right?”

The recruits shook their heads in the negative.

“Great. I want you to exchange cards with the person across from you and see how you did.”

Twenty cards were exchanged across the table, and then the groans and laughs began. Chance shushed everybody and picked the closest couple to share their conclusions.

“I thought you were playing a Drazen,” exclaimed the man who’d been sitting across from Gretchen. “And you practically told me that your cargo was replacement parts for a Sharf racer.”

“Me? A Drazen?”

“You’ve been playing with your tentacle for the last hour!”

“That’s my ponytail,” Gretchen protested. “How did you read a tentacle into it? And all that talk about replacement parts for a Sharf racer was your idea. I was just pretending to be interested so you’d keep talking. How come you led me on about your cargo being women’s clothing? I was ready to buy a skirt from you.”

“You brought up clothes and stopped listening,” the man objected. “I told you three times that I don’t know a thing about women’s clothes and I’m not interested in learning.”

“I thought if you were being so vehement about it you must be hiding something,” Gretchen admitted.

“Excellent,” Chance complimented them. “Now, how many of you had the same experience this morning?”

One hand went up, then two, then four more, and then all of the recruits had their hands raised.

“Does anybody remember Thomas or myself telling you to stop asking the same question different ways and to move on to another subject?”

All of the hands went down, then a few guilty-looking recruits raised them halfway, and then the entire group followed suit.

“So how many of you, after a couple of beers or high-fructose fruit juices, ended up talking about your favorite subjects rather than trying to find out what the other person was interested in?”

There were some embarrassed grins, but all of the hands stayed up.

“That’s fine for a first try, in fact, I’m glad it worked out this way,” Chance said. “When the job is socializing and having a good time, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that it’s still a job. But if you want EarthCent Intelligence to pay your bar tabs, you have to produce something other than a shopping list.”

“A-B-A,” Thomas said, drawing the letters in the air with a finger. “Always Be Asking. There may come a time in your career when you’ll be assigned to obtain a particular piece of intelligence, but for now, our idea of a good spy is somebody who goes somewhere and learns everything the natives know. The only way to do that is to ask questions and listen to the answers.”

“Alright, let’s break for lunch, and we’ll take an extra hour today in case you want to squeeze in a nap on the wrestling mats. This afternoon will be dancing with aliens, so ladies, bring your heels if you have them.”

Ten

“Come in,” a musical voice sang over the speaker in response to Woojin’s pushing the door bell. Lynx and Woojin took a moment to brush the snow off of each other’s hoods and coats, and stamped their feet on the grating to free the ice from the deep treads in the soles of their survival boots before entering.

“I’m Lynx and he’s Woojin,” Lynx announced as they entered the warm room. “Thank you for agreeing to see us on such short notice. I apologize in advance that we didn’t quite get your name or your official title over the comm because the reception was terrible.”

“Joan Powell. I’m the designated stakeholder,” replied the delicate woman who met them. She ushered her guests to a pair of low chairs positioned in front of a desk on a raised pedestal, where she took her own seat. “I see you don’t recognize my title, but the best human analogy would be akin to my holding a temporary and revocable power-of-attorney for all of the stakeholders in the consortium.”

“For the Two Mountains consortium?” Lynx asked in surprise. “I know a young Drazen woman who has an executive position in a human business on Union Station, but I’ve never heard of a Drazen consortium putting a human in charge.”

The woman burst out in tinkling laughter which was so contagious that Woojin joined in. Lynx glared at her husband, which only made him laugh harder.

“Oh, my word,” Joan exclaimed, when she finally caught her breath. “The Two Mountains consortium owns this entire planet. Our human consortium can’t even afford to pay the Drazens for an enhanced comm link, which is why we had trouble talking earlier. You arrived during the high season for sunspots.”

“The Drazens charge that much for a satellite channel?” Woojin asked.

“I should have said that we get so few visitors that it just doesn’t make economic sense to pay the subscription fee,” Joan corrected herself. “I have to answer to the stakeholders for expenses, and none of the women would be very happy with me if there was no money for phinter strings because I spent it on a luxury like spread spectrum communications.”

“What do you do with phinter strings?” Lynx asked. “I remember a trader telling me that they only come from the tails of the Drazen equivalent of a unicorn and they’re worth a thousand times their weight in gold.”

“We use them to restring our phinters, of course,” Joan replied, seemingly puzzled by the question. “The only other application I know of is for strangling a regicide, but that may only be in fables.”

“Drazen fables?” Woojin inquired.

“Certainly,” Joan said. “It would be strange if phinter strings appeared in human fables when we had no knowledge they even existed. But I’m sure you didn’t come all the way from Union Station to talk to me about our amateur musical efforts. I believe you said something about EarthCent in your initial transmission?”

“That’s right,” Lynx replied. “We’re both employed by EarthCent Intelligence, and it recently came to our attention that self-governing human communities are taking hold on some of the alien worlds where they’re permitted. We’ve been tasked to open a dialogue with the new governments and offer whatever assistance we can, other than financial, of course.”

“Of course,” Joan echoed with a smile. “Would your timing have anything to do with the recent arrival of a regional organizer from the Human Expatriates Election League?”

“We just got married a few weeks ago,” Lynx replied. “Our boss offered us this assignment as a working honeymoon.”

“Good business,” the designated stakeholder said, nodding her head in approval. “Well, you just missed the HEEL organizer in any case. I’m afraid that some of our more active stakeholders ran him off the planet. I tried to explain to them that he wasn’t attempting to stage a hostile takeover, but I’m afraid that’s how they interpreted all of his talk about combining shares to elect board members. Somebody cued him into our bylaws at the last minute, and he requested that I issue him a temporary LLO statement authorizing him to stay, but frankly, he didn’t have a tentacle to hang from.”

“An LLO?” Woojin asked.

“Licensed Labor Organizer,” Joan elucidated. “If he had requested an LLA, Licensed Labor Agitator, I might have given it to him, for the entertainment value if nothing else. He really didn’t seem to have the foggiest notion of how we live here, but he was well-funded, and it’s not hard to get an audience in a bar if you’re willing to pay for the Divverflips.”

“That bubbling drink the macho Drazen guys pour down?” Lynx asked in disbelief “The one traders use to clean space lichen off of their hulls? I bought a Divverflip once to try cleaning up some stains in my hold, but it ate through the thermos before I got back to my ship.”

The designated stakeholder burst out laughing a second time, reaching back and gripping her ponytail with one hand, as if it were a tentacle that could pop up and embarrass her.

“They aren’t entirely authentic,” Joan said. “Our bartenders cut way back on the concentration of some of the acids, they just leave enough to make your lips tingle. My husband and son drink them, but males will be males. That’s why we don’t give them any say in how to run the household.”

“We really don’t know anything about your situation here,” Woojin said. “The Drazen ambassador on Union Station told us that it’s a recent development for a consortium to grant even limited autonomy to so large a settlement of aliens living on a productive world, but you seem to be ahead of the curve.”

“Not many Drazen colonists wanted to live this far north due to the cold, but changing the axial tilt of the planet for a larger temperate zone is expensive,” Joan explained. “Two Mountains granted us a sub-charter as an independent consortium with mineral rights above the sixtieth parallel, subject to their receiving a fifty-percent cut and four seats on the board. All of us either worked for Two Mountains or grew up in their company towns, and we regard the sub-charter as a production bonus for completing the two-generation labor contract that brought our families to this planet in the first place.”

The designated stakeholder halted her exposition and sniffed the air with an intent look on her face. She rose from her chair, sniffing as she went, and worked her way around to where Lynx and Woojin were seated. Lynx managed an embarrassed smile as the woman sniffed around the collar of her coat before giving Woojin the same treatment.

“Have you been eating Blue Snakees?” Joan asked him.

“Spoon worms, imported from Korea and farmed on Chianga.”

“Chianga! That’s why I thought they were Blue Snakees. We trade with the humans there because they make great floaters and serviceable power packs, but they keep sending me these faux-Dollnick delicacies on every Prince’s Day.”

“So you’re not big fans of Dollnick fare,” Woojin hazarded a guess.

“Most of it is poisonous and the rest tastes like tentacle mange,” she replied dismissively. “I’d be the last person to suggest that humans ignore the cultivated tastes of the superior cultures we’ve come in contact with, but Dollnicks?”

“I’m with you a hundred percent, as long as I don’t have to drink a Divverflip,” Lynx volunteered.

“You know, we’ve been talking with the Chiangans about getting together on neutral ground sometime. We want to look for areas of cooperation that would allow us to cut overhead costs,” Joan said. “We trade with several other independent human communities on Dollnick and Verlock worlds, but somehow we never manage to get together in the same place to discuss the broader issues. I suppose it’s because none of us are prepared to acknowledge another one of our group as the leader.”

“Use us,” Lynx offered immediately. “Our embassy on Union Station is always hosting conferences and trade shows. Our ambassador and the local Stryx are highly supportive of inter-species cooperation. It’s like their main thing.”

“Are you suggesting that the stakeholders in our consortium are a different species than the humans on Chianga or Union Station?” Joan asked, with a twinkle in her eye.

“I’ve been married to her for three weeks, and we’ve known each other for years, but she still thinks I’m from a different species,” Woojin said to cover Lynx’s slip.

“You are,” his wife muttered under her breath.

“Do you have any idea how much something like a conference/trade show package would cost?” Joan asked. “I could justify bringing along some team leaders and mineral samples if there was a commercial component, but I imagine that food and lodging on a Stryx station can add up. The tunnel charges alone are probably more than we can manage.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if EarthCent Intelligence would foot the bill for the whole thing,” Woojin said. “While I primarily work in training and contingency planning, I know that the agency runs at a profit by trading on business intelligence, and I suspect our money people will figure out how to make a profit on you as well.”

The designated stakeholder broke into a wide smile. “You couldn’t have brought better news. I was worried that you came to lecture us about the joys of representative government run by professional parasites, like that HEEL man. What a relief to hear that EarthCent has its business priorities straight. Can I take the two of you on a tour of our mines?”

“No worms or Divverflips?” Lynx asked.

“Just a few hundred thousand hard-working stakeholders tunneling under mountains,” Joan replied. “I have a Chiangan floater out back, so we can be at the closest entrance and out of the weather in five minutes.”

As the floater zipped its three occupants across the frozen tundra to the sound of a women’s choral group coming over the hidden speakers, Woojin and Lynx wondered at the strange layout of the town.

“I was so happy to see your office and get out of the snow that it didn’t occur to me to ask why you’re stuck out at the landing field,” Woojin finally said. “It seems like a pretty noisy location for the effective manager of a consortium.”

“As designated stakeholder, I have a fiscal responsibility to see that all of our product is fairly weighed and credited,” Joan replied. “I know that in Earth corporations that would be a low-level job, but we hold by the Drazen approach that you have no place at the top if you don’t know the bottom inside-out.”

“Oh, I think I heard a saying about that from a Drazen friend,” Lynx commented.

“Be the job,” Joan quoted.

“No, it had something to do with leadership.”

“For clean management, follow the janitor,” Joan suggested.

“That’s a good one too, but I think the ambassador was referring to his work in the immersives, if that helps.”

“If you have to act like you know what you’re doing, start again at the bottom.”

“That’s it,” Lynx said. “Bork told me that one when I mentioned the difficulties I was having representing EarthCent at some of the sporting events our ambassador skipped. I’m also the cultural attaché for the Union Station embassy, but I can’t keep up with some of these alien sports, including Drazen Crackback.”

“You can ask my husband later, he and my son play in the local league. All of the men do.”

“But you need a tentacle,” Lynx protested.

“They use prosthetics. Here we are, now duck your heads because I’m going to drop the fields and it’s a low entry.”

The cold wind briefly returned as the floater stopped right before the entry to the mine. A sensor detected their presence, retracted the door, and the floater crept in, the gunwales barely clearing the roof.

“Just keep your heads down,” the driver warned her guests. “There’s a parking area up on the right here, and then we’ll change to a rail car.”

“Floaters don’t hold up in the mines?” Woojin guessed.

“The filters keep clogging, but the main problem is weight capacity,” Joan said, as she eased the floater into the crudely hewn chamber, holding her head sideways as she peered over the dashboard. When she set it down, there was just enough room to climb out and move back to the main passage in a crouch. “The energy balance just doesn’t make sense when you’re transporting tons of ore out of a mine. We’d end up spending more on energy packs than the Yttrium yield can justify.”

“Is that your main product here?”

“Oh, we make use of everything one way or another. You won’t find any tailing piles outside of Drazen mines,” the human said proudly. “Most of the metal ores are smelted for local construction and manufacturing materials. Even with the space elevators in the South, it’s tough to compete with the asteroid mining outfits that work the inner belts of this system. But the Yttrium is all for export, and most of it goes back to the Drazen home world for high-temperature superconductors that they use in military applications, like rail guns.”

Still crouching, the three humans clambered into a heavily built rail car with permanently reclining seats that lowered the required ceiling clearance. The touch panel that controlled the car was the only part that didn’t look like somebody had pounded on it with a sledge hammer for a few decades. There were glow lamps strung all along the main passage, and five rails, spaced oddly, ran along the floor on metal ties.

“What’s the point of the fifth rail?” Woojin asked, as the mining car began to move forward with a lurch.

“It’s a monorail for emergency worker evacuation,” Joan explained. “The Two Mountains consortium has never treated its human workers as expendable, so when it comes to our husbands and sons, we could hardly do less.”