Date Night on Union Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

random alien spacefaring artifacts, the nameplates of which could have served as the galaxy’s Rosetta Stone for “No user serviceable parts.”
    That morning, an EarthCent apparatchik had contacted Mac’s Bones out of the blue and offered to pay a cancellation fee on the disintegrator deal. After some minor blustering in an attempt to get the price up, he’d settled for twenty-five hundred Stryx creds, which would pay the rent for another cycle. So Joe was in a good mood as he showered and dressed for his first introduction through the Eemas service.
    After years of being inundated with Eemas ads through every form of station media, he had to admit he was curious to find out if the service was as good as its frightening reputation. Frightening for a forty-year-old bachelor. Thanks to a barter deal for a salvaged Alterian fuel pack with less than a quarter of its power remaining, Joe was the proud owner of a second-hand Eemas subscription with just one date used.
    The original owner had been so desperate to fire up his little scout ship and get off the station that he threw in his silver suit of clothes to sweeten the deal. Unfortunately, the guy had sported a lower center of gravity than Joe’s rangy frame, so the sleeves were a bit short and the cut was somewhat baggy. But Union Station fashions were eclectic, to say the least, and Joe believed that even his grandfather’s beekeeper gear would have gone unremarked at a party.
    Paul tilted up his chin and squinted against the reflections coming off the suit when Joe finished dressing, but he didn’t say anything, which was normal for the thirteen year old. Paul had been a sort of mascot for Joe’s squad since the age of eight, when they had pulled the starving boy from the wreckage of a smelter on a mining colony that had been raided and destroyed. The raiders were long gone and the constant sandstorms had already buried any bodies left on the surface by the time Joe’s crew arrived, so they never found out if Paul’s parents were dead or taken captive.
    When Joe won Mac’s Bones, he decided to leave the mercenaries and try running the business himself, partly to give Paul a home where the kid could meet some other children. That and the fact that as Joe aged, the mercenary retirement plan of dying with your boots on had been sounding less and less attractive.
    “You go to bed, I may be back late,” he told Paul, before exiting their spacious if crude quarters in the crew module of a scrapped ice harvester which had lost a fight with a comet’s tail. The remains of the vessel sat in an improvised cradle near the entrance of the hold that contained Mac’s Bones. As part of the inner docking and warehousing deck, the space featured the highest ceilings on the station, but the floor curvature was more noticeable than on the outer decks.
    Some show-off civilizations employed artificial black holes at the center of spherical space stations to create gravitational pull, but they were a technical nightmare to build and maintain, and ridiculously expensive in fuel for arriving and departing ships. The space stations built by the Stryx were all versions of an enormous, slowly spinning cylinder, with a vast hollow core to accommodate shipping traffic and hundreds of concentric decks to satisfy the gravitational preferences of biological tenants.
    The atmospheric plugs in Joe’s nose hummed happily, as if they enjoyed the challenge of filtering breathable air out of the witch’s brew of gases that filled the shared areas of the station, such as the tube lift from the docking deck to the residential areas. Many of the humans who frequented mixed sections of the station wore the plugs in a little locket around their necks so that they were always available when needed.
    It took tourists a while to get accustomed to the plugs, and humans had to remember not to breathe through their mouths, but versions of the same technology allowed many species to mingle in shared areas