Vacation on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 7) (15 page)

“What are the kids doing?” Kelly asked.

“Our quality control testers will be in their lab until supper, which will happen as soon as Stanley and Donna arrive with our food,” Joe replied. “Samuel rejected the gun on the principle that it ran out of ammunition, and Ailia concluded that her stuffed animal was insufficiently water-proofed. When I left, they had moved on to testing an alien game that involved colorful floating balls that knock into each other, sort of like billiards without the cues or table. Banger was keeping score on his abacus.”

“Alright,” Kelly said. “You’re obviously having a good time being the president but now it’s time to deal with business. Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“The bad news,” Joe replied without hesitation.

“An order of widgets for one of our best customers has gone missing from the warehouse.”

Beowulf’s ears perked up. Warehouse thieves? He’d sniff them out if the trail was still fresh. But where exactly was the warehouse?

“Do we have any more details?” Joe asked.

“Well, that’s the good news, sort of. I’ve been reading through the company history, and as near as I can tell, it was set up to provide busywork by a species that had gone overboard on automation and accidentally created a zero-employment economy.”

“So rather than selling stuff to real customers, they steal it from their own warehouse?” Joe guessed.

“It’s much more complicated than that. Did you ever hear the story about the two sailors shipwrecked on a desert island who both became wealthy by selling each other seashells on credit?”

“I think you just told it to me, unless you left something out.”

“It’s like the advanced species version of that. They created this company to employ all of the members of their species who wanted jobs, but their actual product was keeping each other busy.”

“Why didn’t they make real products and sell them to real customers if they wanted to work?”

“Because their automation could do it cheaper and faster, and they didn’t think it was logical to shut it all down. So they came in to work every day, designed prototypes, tested them, manufactured and warehoused them, then recycled the inventory into feedstock for the next cycle. And they spent lots of time having meetings.”

The economic logic made no sense to Beowulf, but he did gather that nothing had really been stolen and that there weren’t any criminals to track down. He stopped paying attention and went back to thinking about food. The Huravian hound’s sense memory was so good that he found himself drooling over the imagined smell of Donna’s casserole.

“Knock, knock,” the embassy office manager said, entering the conference room. “Are we interrupting an important meeting?”

“I thought I heard something about a closed-cycle company,” Stanley added, setting a large picnic basket on the conference table. “You know they were quite common on Earth before the Stryx opened the planet.”

“But you’re always telling us that Earth was going broke,” Kelly objected. “Doesn’t running a company that doesn’t really sell anything cost a lot of money?”

“Sure,” Stanley replied. “Nobody planned for it to work that way, and to some extent, the so-called training companies contributed to the global economic collapse. When they were first introduced in Old Europe, they were supposed to provide training for chronically unemployed workers whose industries had been automated or outsourced. But it soon became apparent that there wasn’t any need for the workers they were training, so the governments running the training companies started promoting the existing employees to management jobs and letting them hire new workers to train.”

“Sounds like a train wreck in waiting,” Joe punned.

“Just one of many,” Stanley replied. “The governments kept printing money to fund these companies, and they started doing fake business with each other, complete with conventions, sales forces, even poaching workers. By the time the Stryx arrived, they accounted for around a third of the total employment in Old Europe. They even had strikes and collective bargaining.”

“Knock, knock?” said a very tentative android as it entered the conference room. Its facial expression was somewhere between contrite and nervous. “Given certain developments, I felt I had to ask if you would be coming in to work tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Joe said. “We have another six days of vacation.”

“Thank you. Thank you,” the android said, brightening up immediately. “I’m sorry I’m so out of practice, but I have a hostile take-over and tax problems planned to keep you busy, not to mention difficulties in sourcing gems for the new ball gown line.”

“Could I ask a question about you?” Kelly ventured, feeling she’d earned the right. “Are you alone here, and if so, did you always have to run the whole operation yourself?”

“Oh, dear, no,” the android replied. “I’m really just the caretaker. I used to be the receptionist, but the original owners put me in charge when they left. When the company was going full force, the employees had no problem keeping each other busy. I understand that they sometimes created shell-companies just to make extra work for lawyers and accountants. I’ve been negotiating with Stryx Libby to restart operations with temporary staff from your species, and I’m hoping that there will be enough of you to support the business model.”

“Which is?” Stanley asked.

“Keeping everybody busy,” the android replied happily.

Fifteen

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Thomas told Walter. He led the HEEL organizer over to where the recruits were making a desultory effort at their morning calisthenics without an instructor. Physical conditioning was one of the traditional mainstays of the training program for which the artificial person could muster no enthusiasm, since he saw it as a waste of time and energy. It also meant that the trainees had to take a shower before changing into the rented evening wear that Thomas insisted was the natural armor of the spy.

“Attention everybody. Walter will be joining our class starting from this morning, so I want you all to line up and give him a big EarthCent Intelligence welcome.”

The recruits dutifully broke off from their half-hearted exercises and lined up side-by-side, facing their instructor and the newcomer. Thomas gave Walter a little push forward.

“Hello,” Walter said, offering a handshake to the first woman in line.

“Gretchen,” she replied, tickling the back of his hand with her thumb. She looked at him expectantly, and seemed disappointed when he didn’t react.

“Walter,” the new recruit said, moving to the next in line.

“Bonnie-Sue,” the woman replied, giving his hand a quick squeeze, followed by two long squeezes. Walter was beginning to wonder if there were special pheromones in the soap he had showered with that morning, because he’d never gotten this kind of reaction from women before.

“Stephen,” the next recruit identified himself, using his thumb-tip to tap on the knuckle of the new recruit’s index finger. Walter disengaged rapidly and moved to the next in line.

“I’m Walter,” he said, tentatively extending his hand.

“Judith,” the woman replied, spreading her fingers as he took her hand, such that her index and middle fingers landed on top of his palm, behind his thumb, while her ring finger and pinky wrapped the lower part of his hand. Thomas trailed just behind Walter, observing the greetings.

“They’re secret handshakes, right?” Walter asked. He was greatly relieved to find that all of his fellow trainees weren’t making personal advances.

“Tradecraft,” Thomas corrected him. “Secret handshakes are used to gain admission to meetings of private societies where everybody follows the same system. We’ve been practicing ways that agents in the field can identify each other when they’ve never met before by using agreed upon signals, sign and counter-sign. By the end of the training course, you’ll be expected to come up with a countersign of your own to use in handshakes, and to be able to identify all of your fellow recruits through a handshake while blindfolded.”

“Is that really the sort of thing we’re likely to use out there?” Walter asked, gesturing vaguely at the ceiling of Mac’s Bones.

“Not the handshake itself, you can forget that after graduation,” Thomas said. “It’s the craft, the ability to memorize and reproduce recognition signals that you may be required to exchange with other humans or aliens.”

“And it beats doing laps around the hold,” Gretchen added.

“Dancing is better exercise in any case,” Chance said, arriving late as usual. “Is everybody ready for our first field trip?”

“Are we going to a bar to extract information from crews visiting the station?” Stephen asked.

“I’d rather try charming aliens on the dance floor,” Bonnie-Sue said.

“Are you taking us to a repair depot for artificial people to see how you’re put together?” asked Eli. The young man had been completely won over by the way Thomas and Chance were running the training camp when they introduced him to drinking beer in the morning.

“Today we’re going to do a live training exercise in the Shuk,” Chance told them. “Thomas and I don’t see the point of sending agents into the field without testing their nerves. We’ll be there to back you up, but this is your chance to show us if you have a natural talent for the business.”

“Are we going to try following each other through the crowds without being detected?” Stephen asked. “I heard that’s how they separated the field agents from the analysts in the last class.”

“When I first joined EarthCent Intelligence, I thought half the job would be following people without being seen,” Thomas said. “But it turns out that’s all done with technology these days, from products like Nanotracker, to blanket surveillance by imaging on most worlds and artificial structures, like this station. The focus of EarthCent Intelligence is to build our network of information sources while paying the bills with timely information for businesses. Sometimes our agents are tasked with procuring samples of alien products for manufacturers who are interested in making human versions.”

“Today you’ll be learning how to perform under real-world conditions, making contact with sources in the field based on limited information,” Chance said. “Thomas and I visited the Shuk yesterday and we purchased items from ten different vendors, but in each case, we said that we would send somebody to pick-up the package later. Everybody find your partner, and I’m going to give each team a slip of paper telling you which species we bought from and the general category of goods they sell. Your assignment is to find the right vendor and retrieve the package without asking whether something was purchased and left for pick-up yesterday. Do you understand?”

“You mean, if you bought a pan from Kitchen Kitsch, the only clue we’re going to get is that it’s a cooking utensil sold by humans, and we have to talk to every human selling pots and pans until we find the right booth?” Gretchen asked.

“How will we know we’ve found the right booth if we can’t ask if somebody left a package?” Eli added.

“If it was going to be as easy as walking around and asking if somebody left a package yesterday, we wouldn’t bother with the exercise,” Thomas told them. “It’s about learning to ask the right questions and listening to the answers.”

“But without drinks,” Stephen said.

“You can drink if it will help you,” Chance told him. “Now, who was partnered with the woman who dropped out? You can have our new recruit.”

Walter found himself paired with Judith, who seemed much colder now that she had to rely on him for a mission.

“Are you any good at talking to strangers?” Judith asked him.

“I had rotten vegetables thrown at me the last time I tried, but that was because somebody else was putting words in my mouth.”

“Here,” Chance said, extending a scrap of paper to the couple. Judith snatched it and read the penciled message before passing it on to Walter.

“Frunge, medieval weapons,” Walter read. “This is going to be impossible.”

“Alright everybody,” Thomas said. “Chance and I will be circulating and keeping an eye on things, but if you get into trouble, just ping the station librarian and ask her to notify us. Are you all ready?”

“Wait a second,” Walter said. “I can’t talk to aliens. I don’t have an implant.”

“That’s not exactly correct,” Thomas told him. “All of the vendors in the Shuk will be able to understand you, it’s just that you won’t understand them. Maybe it would be interesting to have everybody turn off their implants.”

“Not today,” Chance told Thomas, as all of the recruits groaned and sent Walter dirty looks. “We should see how it works before adding an order of difficulty.”

“Let’s go then,” Thomas said. “Judith, you can translate for Walter if necessary. We’ll meet for a coffee break at Baked Beans in two hours to see how everybody is doing. Oh, and please change into your spy clothes first, or nobody will trust you enough to hand over a package even if you get everything else right.”

An hour later, the sole team that had successfully retrieved a package, a pumice grater sold by a Verlock stone merchant, had succeeded through no efforts of their own. The vendor, who rarely sold anything to humans, called the pair over as they walked past his booth and asked if they were there for the pick-up.

Chance spotted Stephen and his partner Bonnie-Sue in the Dollnick section and moved into position to observe. The humans had just left a puzzled Dolly behind as they exited his jewelry shop and approached the next booth.

“I’ll try this time,” Stephen said. He stepped forward to examine a tray of watches passing by on a rotating vertical display, and the Dollnick merchant came over almost immediately.

“You have excellent taste, my good sir,” the Dolly purred obsequiously. “Would you like me to wrap that one for you?”

“Uh, actually, I was hoping you could help me with something else,” the agent trainee replied.

“Certainly, sir,” the vendor said, sweeping out all four arms in a gesture intended to encompass his entire stock of goods. “I am the sole proprietor of my business and I know my merchandise like I know my wives. I can help you with everything you see here.”

“What about what we can’t see?” Stephen asked, hoping the innuendo would translate into Dollnick.

“What we can’t see,” the merchant repeated, sounding puzzled. “Were you looking for banned Farling drugs perhaps, or a woman? I might know somebody…”

“No. I’m here for, uh, what do you have that’s popular with humans?”

“Those wrist watches you were examining earlier are strong sellers, as are these clocks with the little birds that pop out. A recent Dollnick invention,” the vendor added proudly.

“Did you sell any recently?” Stephen asked desperately. “Like, yesterday?”

“As a matter of fact, I did just sell one of these finely crafted wonders to a young human couple,” the Dollnick said.

“Can I take it with me then?” Stephen asked.

“Of course,” the Dollnick replied, reaching up on the shelf behind him and bringing down a boxed version of the displayed clock. “That will be fifty-four creds.”

“Oh, I thought they paid for it already,” the trainee said.

“They did,” the Dollnick replied. “If you want one, you have to pay for it also.” He eyed the human suspiciously and didn’t let go of the box. “You’re not a left-over Wanderer looking for handouts, are you?”

“Never mind,” Stephen mumbled. He turned back to his partner and said, “Your turn next.”

Chance made a mental note to work with Stephen on his conversational skills.

Not far away, Thomas was watching Gretchen ward off the not-so-subtle advances of a young Drazen merchant who was laboring under the misconception that the human woman had been coming on to him.

“But you said you were looking for something special, baby,” the Drazen said. “I’m as special as it gets.”

“Something special in the way of musical instruments,” Gretchen protested, backing steadily away. “I’m sure I have the wrong booth.”

“How can you know before you’ve even tried?” the Drazen countered, following closely. “If the two of you are a pair, I can give you special price. The three of us will make some beautiful music together.”

“You were planned on charging me!” Gretchen exclaimed, coming to an abrupt halt. “What are you? Some kind of gigolo?”

“For a hundred creds, I’m whoever you want me to be,” the Drazen replied. He grabbed a potted plant off another vendor’s table and placed it on his head where he held it steady with his tentacle. “You see? Now I’m a Frunge.”

Gretchen grabbed her partner’s arm and fled into the crowd. Thomas was about to follow and watch what they did next, when he saw Eli charge by, a human woman in a white apron in hot pursuit.

“Stop, thief,” the woman yelled.

An old Drazen delicatessen clerk grabbed a string of sausages and whipped them around the fleeing human’s feet, bringing him to the floor. Eli crashed down on the package he was carrying, which burst open like a sugar bomb, sending frosting and bits of fruit flying in every direction. The victims of the sweet attack, mainly Drazens, greedily swiped bits off of themselves and their neighbors, enjoying the free treat.

“Oh, you’ve ruined it,” the woman cried, standing over the stunned trainee. “What am I going to tell that nice old man when he comes to pick it up?”

“Old man?” Eli groaned, rolling over and getting to his knees. Several Drazens happily raised him to his feet, helping clean the mess off his chest at the same time. The Drazens had cast-iron stomachs and they weren’t going to let a little incidental contact with the deck stop them from eating some freshly baked squashed cake.

“You just stole a fiftieth anniversary surprise, you, you, cake stealer!” the young pastry chef cried. She stared up at the embarrassed face of the young spy, who was coming to realize that he had not only grabbed the wrong package, but he had fled from a girl who was a head shorter than him and maybe half his weight.

“I’m sorry,” he stuttered, pulling his change purse out of the inner pocket of his frosting-covered suit. “Please let me pay…”

“You’re going to explain it to my customer!” the girl declared, reaching up and grabbing Eli by an ear lobe. “You’re coming with me.”

“But you said a young couple had placed a special order for pick-up yesterday,” Eli protested, though he didn’t try to break out of her grip. “My partner and I were picking up for them.”

“I was bringing it for you,” the girl said in frustration. “The anniversary cake was on top of your box and I moved it to the counter so I could get your order. Then that crazy woman with you started shouting, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and you grabbed it and ran.”