“Would it be possible to purchase a copy of that hologram from the breakfast place?” he asked.
“It’s free with the tip if you have your own storage device,” Flazint told him, much to Dorothy’s surprise. The Frunge girl added an aside for her co-worker. “People come back and ask for the security holograms all the time, usually friends and family members. The high resolution version is only available for a couple of days, though. I guess even the Stryx run out of storage space eventually.”
When Flazint turned back to the Lood, he was proffering his knife, held by the tip.
“My personal storage unit is in the handle,” he said. “Can your device access it?”
“Sure, it works with everything,” Flazint asserted. She accepted the knife, placed it on the turntable, and requested a copy of the confrontation. The hologram they had just watched played again, but at twenty times the speed. In a few seconds, the transfer was over.
“Thank you,” Z’harp said. “We’re not all, uh, you know.”
“No species is,” Flazint answered philosophically, spinning the Lood’s five-cred piece on the counter. “Come again any time.”
“Thank you,” Dorothy added.
“There’s our lunch money,” Flazint said as soon as the Lood took his leave. “Are you feeling adventurous?”
“Humans can’t tolerate much cross-species food,” Dorothy admitted. “Just some of the grains and vegetables, and you guys don’t eat grains.”
“We could get something from the Little Apple,” the Frunge girl offered generously. “Sometimes my family orders a pizza special without the dough, but you could get it under your half.”
“Great! We’ve got plenty in the tip jar to splurge on delivery.”
“Oh, I forgot. Somebody will have to go for it,” Flazint said. “They won’t take a crustless order unless you show up in person. I guess they have trouble with pranks.”
“You go ahead,” Dorothy said. “Business seems to have slowed down a bit, probably another big party in the hotel district.”
“If things get busy, just ping me, and I’ll come back as soon as they take the order. Otherwise, I shouldn’t be more than twenty minutes.”
Dorothy decided to use the time to familiarize herself with the objects in the overflow bins behind the counter, which were effectively blocking the bottom row of shelves. She was puzzling over a device that looked like a cross between a tiny folding chair and a pair of headphones when the Lood returned.
“Is something wrong with the recording, Z’harp?” she inquired.
“I know nothing of a recording,” the Lood replied, reaching for his mask.
Dorothy’s blood ran cold when she recognized the voice of the young Lord Z’fark from the Physics Ride. She blanched in horror as the Lood removed his mask, revealing a lidless third eye in the middle of his forehead which glowed with a malignant inner light.
“I am happy to encounter you again, Dorothy McAllister,” Z’fark said in a honeyed voice. “Wouldn’t you like to come with me and see my ship?”
As much as she was disgusted by the third eye, Dorothy felt compelled to stare directly at it, and her mind began to feel oddly blank. Wasn’t there somebody she was supposed to call or something she was supposed to do? All of her thoughts seemed to be pulled towards that awful eye, and then she found herself wondering why she had never seen the inside of a Lood ship. The light emitted by the eye grew brighter and brighter, and without thinking, she raised a hand to try to keep it from blinding her.
“Witch!” the Lood cried in fear. He dropped to his knees, turning away and replacing his gold mask at the same time. “Forgive me, witch. How could I know you were appearing in the form of a lowly Human?”
Dorothy blinked as her own thoughts rushed back and her vision returned to normal. The first thing she saw was her hand raised before her face, the black bracelet displayed prominently on her wrist where the sleeve of her blouse had fallen back. The runes engraved in the strange metal glowed like lava.
“Get out!” she screamed at the Lood, who half stumbled, half crawled to the exit and disappeared. Dorothy sank down on the floor, her arms around her knees, taken by a sudden fit of trembling. It took her a minute just to catch her breath enough to say, “Libby?”
“Yes, Dorothy,” the station librarian replied. “Your adrenalin levels are highly elevated and they’ll return to normal faster if you walk back and forth behind the counter. I’ll keep the doors closed until Flazint returns. Our careless open house guests can come back later.”
“He was going to make me go with him,” Dorothy whispered. “Why didn’t you explain that the bracelet would protect me?”
“The Lood’s fear of what the bracelet represents is what protected you,” the Stryx librarian explained. “If I had sent a bot to escort him off the station, he might have tried something again in the future, maybe finding you in some place where you’d truly be alone. Some sentients will go to extreme lengths to avenge an imagined injury. This way, he’ll want to keep as far away from you as possible as long as he lives, and he’ll tell his friends that human girls can be dangerous.”
Dorothy struggled to her feet and began to walk shakily back and forth behind the counter. After a few minutes, her heart rate began to slow and she started thinking about practical things.
“Libby?”
“Yes, Dorothy.”
“Don’t tell my parents about this. They might get all weird about my going out alone on dates with David.”
Eighteen
“Thank you for keeping the hostages entertained all morning,” Pava said to her mother-in-law. “I hope you’ve given them a chance to win back some of their losses.”
“The hostages really have a gift for this game.” The Dowager Empress looked up from her tiles and peered at the Union Station delegation. “The funny-looking one almost took the deal from me.”
“It’s very similar to the Korean version of Mahjong that my husband taught me on our honeymoon,” Lynx replied. After weeks of daily exposure to the emperor’s mother, she had developed a soft spot for the blunt old Cayl. “We used to play with the ship controller as a third.”
“And I learned the traditional four-handed version playing in the tea house at the Shuk during slow hours.” Brinda swapped a tile from the front to the back of her double row and added, “Don’t ever get into a game with a Stryx.”
“Would you be referring to young Jeeves, the Stryx who arranged for the hostage swap?” the Dowager Empress asked. She played a tile inscribed with an ancient Cayl character, making clear she had no intention of letting the humans go before the hand was finished. “I thought he caught on to the strategy a little too quickly for somebody who claimed never to have played before.”
“I’m still a little fuzzy on what all the lizard pieces mean,” Woojin said.
“They’re bonus pieces, think of them as doublers,” the Dowager Empress explained. “Speaking of which, I have four of them, and thanks to your discard, I also seem to have made Cryan Hah again. Shall I total up the points?”
“When you said we have a gift for the game, I think you meant we’re a gift TO your game,” Lynx grumbled good-naturedly.
“Were you involved in the hostage negotiations, Kiki?” Woojin asked. He was the only one who had taken the emperor’s mother at her word when she told them to ignore her official title.
“Oh, yes,” the Dowager Empress replied. “It’s one of my few official duties, along with choosing a new emperor should my Brynt not return or do something equally unacceptable. I specifically requested of Stryx Jeeves that he select hostages with an aptitude for Cryan Hah to console me for my son’s absence.”
“I should have known he wasn’t serious about holding an auction for you when he didn’t draw up a draft contract,” Brinda said. “Wouldn’t it have been more conventional to ask for a hostage of equal value?”
“And where would the Stryx have obtained one of those?” the old Cayl asked imperiously. “I’d have to request the population of an entire world to get within clawing distance of equal value for my Brynt, and then my daughter-in-law would have to feed them all.”
“I guess we don’t really have anybody of the emperor’s rank and power in the tunnel network species, but you might keep Jeeves next time,” Lynx suggested.
“Keep a Stryx?” The Dowager Empress cackled as she began stacking the Cryan Hah tiles back in their plain wooden case. “Stryx are pretty indestructible, if you haven’t noticed, which hardly makes them good hostage material. And even if we did catch his robotic puppet with its guard down, their minds aren’t locked into the same physical space. The Stryx went multi-dimensional long before our predecessor species came out of the forests and began damming streams.”
A number of Cayl cubs barreled into the room, batting an inky black ball back and forth between them. Every time the ball contacted a surface, it rebounded at an unexpected angle, as if it was rapidly spinning. When the ball shot past the table, Woojin made a dive for it, but it changed course midair to avoid his grasp. The Cayl cubs found this hilarious and fell on the floor alongside him, flailing their limbs in a display of mirth.
“I see males really are the same everywhere,” the Dowager Empress commented. She finished packing the Cryan Hah pieces back into their case and sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which one of you he belongs to.”
“Me,” Lynx said, getting up from the table and helping her husband off the deck.
“This morning I received a message from your Jeeves that the open house on Union Station is winding down and my Brynt will be coming home soon,” the empress said. “I’m sorry I’ve been so tied up with babysitting, it can’t have been a very nice hostage experience for you. If you don’t mind being in an airship with children, I’d like to take you on a tour of our surroundings.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Brinda said, rising from the table. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing more of your planet. But didn’t you tell the four ambassadors at the state dinner that hostage protocols prevent you from allowing us outside of the palace grounds?”
“They seemed so anxious to involve you in a fatal sight-seeing accident that I thought it wise to nip that idea in the bud,” Pava said. “The ambassadors aren’t the most original thinkers, but they are persistent, and I didn’t want to expose you to any unnecessary danger.”
“But we were told that the Cayl never lie to guests,” Lynx objected, immediately wishing she had chosen a more diplomatic way to express the thought.
“I’m sure you can see how it’s useful to us for our guests to believe that,” the Dowager Empress replied with a wink. “Now it’s time for my nap, so please make sure you have all of the cubs with you before you go out.”
The empress herded the young Cayl out of the game room before her, and then led the humans through a seemingly endless series of twisty passages to an armored door. There she turned around and faced the three, an unusually serious expression on her normally cheerful face.
“Can I trust you to keep a secret?”
“We’re professional spies,” Woojin said, placing his arm around Lynx’s shoulders. “It depends who you want the secret kept from.”
“Good answer.” Pava’s features relaxed into a bearish smile. “I’m not even sure why I asked that since I’m sure your Stryx do the same thing all the time. It’s just that I’m planning to bring you to the alien market later today, and it would be best not to mention this to any of the vendors.”
“Mum’s the word,” Woojin promised, and the two women nodded their agreement.
The empress said something their implants didn’t translate, and the door swung upwards, allowing them into a laboratory that would have looked at home in a twentieth century horror film. Oddly shaped containers of some transparent substance held brightly colored fluids that moved between vessels through looping spirals of tubing. Electrical discharges leapt between shiny metal balls in continuous arcs, and a rhythmic mechanical sound like a belt running over a flywheel provided the audio ambiance.
“Are you running an experiment?” Lynx asked the empress.
“None of this was here the last time I came, so it must be some kind of art project that the youngsters are working on. The device I wanted to show you is in the corner.”
Pava brought the humans over to a garishly painted statue of a mythical looking creature with two sets of wings. It was equipped with a single button on the top of its head, and a slot above a silver semi-hemispherical basin under the belly.
“Should I press the button?” Brinda asked, finding herself the closest to the device. The empress nodded, so the younger Hadad sister reached over and pushed the blue button with her forefinger. The wings flapped metallically a few times, there was a sound like a metal washer rolling down a long track, and then a gold coin popped out of the slot and clanged into the catch basin.
“It’s a mechanical bank,” Brinda exclaimed. “We’ve sold a few antique ones on the auction circuit. They used to be very popular with humans. This is the largest one I’ve ever seen, though come to think of it, the mechanism is usually designed to accept coins, not disgorge them.”
“Make some more,” the empress encouraged her. “Five for each of you should be plenty. A gold imperial goes a long way in the alien market.”
Brinda pressed the button four times in rapid succession, the creature flapped its metal wings steadily, and four more coins clanged out. “You guys try it,” she suggested to her companions.
As Woojin stepped forward and pressed the button, Lynx turned to the empress and asked, “Did you mean to imply that this little machine is minting these coins freshly for us?”
“It doesn’t mint them in the sense I think you mean, starting with gold bullion and shaping coins using a stamping or liquid molding process. The materializer uses a neutron collider on the upper deck to create a soup of gold atoms, after which they’re formed into coins with manipulator fields. I’d show you the materialization phase, but the gamma radiation levels require that it be heavily shielded. I’m sure you know that most of the gold in the universe comes from collisions between neutron stars, and although our Golden Goose is a pale imitation of nature, it helps me keep up with household expenses.”
“Do, uh, all the Cayl make their own gold?” Lynx asked.
“Oh, no. It’s a simple process but very energy intensive, and it would hardly be practical if the ship’s main engines hadn’t remained intact. I know the palace doesn’t make a very good impression on visitors, but there are some advantages to having access to warship-scale energy piles and equipment, not to mention the nearly unlimited closet space. Brynt frowns on my using our Golden Goose because he’d rather I sell more art forgeries, but I can hardly send the three of you out peddling my grandchildren’s pottery for pocket money.”
Lynx took her turn at making gold coins, and then the empress led them out of the room and up a different passage, away from the direction from which they’d arrived.
“I told my eldest granddaughter to gather up the cubs and meet us at the imperial yacht,” Pava said, guiding the humans through a particularly narrow point in the corridor where the bulkheads had been crushed in from both sides. “The deck can get a bit slippery up ahead because Brynt keeps putting off doing something about the leaks. I don’t often come this way.”
“I don’t get it,” Lynx muttered to her husband as the water began soaking through her socks. “They have a machine that makes gold out of, whatever, and she won’t hire somebody to repair the roof?”
“Hull,” Woojin corrected her. “Why don’t you just ask her?”
“I will,” Lynx declared, sloshing ahead. “Empress? Do you mind if I ask why you don’t just make some gold and pay somebody to repair the hull leaks?”
“The ship’s skin is a special alloy that can only be welded in a vacuum,” Pava replied. “All of our naval construction is done in orbital shipyards, of course, and nobody can justify the resources necessary to launch the palace into orbit for repairs. I think the real reason Brynt procrastinates gluing a tarp over this section of the hull is because the hounds like having a place inside to splash around and get a drink.”
The corridor opened up into a large bay that was littered with sections of various types of vessels that were either undergoing repairs or being torn down for parts. Directly in their path was a craft that looked very much like it had been sawed in half along its length and then abandoned. A dozen heads popped up over the side and peered down at the new arrivals.
“Hurry up, Grams. The cubs are driving me crazy!” shouted a young Cayl. The humans recognized her as the granddaughter who had interrupted the state dinner to tell the empress about the cub with the stomach complaint. She was visible just long enough to deliver this message before she disappeared under a pile of playful young siblings and cousins.
“They look pretty excited about getting out,” Lynx said. “Is the yacht on the other side of that wreck?”
“Not exactly,” the empress replied, leading them to a ramp that penetrated the hull of the half-ship. “It doesn’t look like much, but I assure you it’s entirely airworthy. One of the previous emperors made it out of an old lifeboat because he wanted an atmospheric craft with a lot of power for towing, and of course, the palace is crammed with old lifeboats. He liked fresh air so he cut off half the hull, but he never got around to adding a convertible top for if it rains.”
A section of the palace hull above their heads began to retract and the yacht lifted smoothly into the air. The craft soared through the opening as soon as there was sufficient clearance, lightly scraping the side as the cubs pulled back their noses.
“Is the, uh, yacht’s captain a Cayl warrior?” Lynx asked nervously, as the vessel gained altitude and speed. A breeze was felt throughout the open boat, and the cubs and the hounds competed for space to hang their heads over the prow, smiling as the strong wind flattened their hair and cooled their tongues.
“My granddaughter, Krey, is flying,” the empress said, indicating the young Cayl near the rear of the open cockpit. The medium-size female had one paw on a joystick, but she appeared to be looking down, rather than forward. “Would you like to try? I’m sure she’d be willing to teach you.”
Over Woojin’s vociferous protest that Krey was doing just fine, Pava led the hostages to the stern. Halfway there, Lynx made the mistake of looking down and saw nothing but the ground rushing past. She grabbed her husband’s arm and choked back a scream.
“Is this section of the hull transparent, or are we held up by some sort of retention field?” Woojin asked the empress.
“It’s part of the original lifeboat hull, to allow the passengers to see out. All Cayl ships use transparent materials for sections of the hull. Oh, look at those boys trying to show off for our Krey.”
Far below them, the humans saw a pack of Cayl streaking across the fields on all fours to keep up with the imperial yacht. They seemed to collide with each other whenever the opportunity arose, leading to spectacular tumbles. At one point, as the young males approached a riverbank that looked more like a cliff, Krey took both of her hands off the joystick tiller to cover her eyes.