Date Night on Union Station Read Online Free PDF

of the space station. The simple plugs worked in sections where the atmosphere contained enough oxygen and nitrogen for them to filter, but if the ratio of the gases was too far off, they would start to overheat, a phenomenon known as “nose burn.”
    After less than a minute in transit, the capsule finished its run and came to a halt at Joe’s destination on the upscale human recreational and residential deck. He emerged and took a few cautious steps to adjust to the minor increase in gravity, feeling all the while like a tourist in his flashy suit.
    The Eemas date was scheduled for 20:30 hours in Chinatown, which meant he had some time to kill if he was going to arrive fashionably late. No points scored by looking needy, he told himself. Instead, he strolled in the opposite direction towards the Little Apple, a sort of melting pot of Earth cultures, though few of the activities that took place in the Little Apple could be described as cultural events.
    Joe ducked reflexively at the sound of popping champagne corks as he strode past the Elvis chapel, where a lucky couple of somethings with two legs and one head each had just tied the knot. Champagne corks popping reminded him of the sound of the goo throwers his men had come up against in the Bereftian action. The goo stuck to armor and deployed an army of nanobots, turning the casualty into—ugh, he’d rather not think about it.
    “Flowers for your lady, sir?” piped up a small girl, tugging at his suit sleeve. She was ten or twelve, with a basket of what appeared to be fresh-cut roses on her arm. The girl was small for her age, and somebody had applied fake smudges of grime to her face, as if there was some secret slum where the station’s maintenance bots would allow dirt to accumulate. It came to him that he’d never been accosted by a flower girl before, which he took as a vote of confidence in the silver suit.
    “Uh, I can take one, I guess,” Joe replied awkwardly. Although he’d been conducting a largely one-sided conversation with Paul for five years, Joe wasn’t very good talking with children, especially little girls.
    “The ladies usually expect a dozen,” the girl pushed her pitch with wide-eyed sincerity. “It’s 5 centees for one or 20 for a dozen, so it’s almost like I’m robbing you if you don’t take twelve.”
    “Oh, alright then, a dozen,” he agreed, making a mental note to cross to the other side of the pedestrian corridor the next time he saw a flower girl waiting. She expertly counted out a dozen roses and wrapped a bit of sticky foil around the stems to keep them together. Joe dug through his pockets and extracted a 25-centee piece for the girl.
    Small trade in the station economy was carried out with Stryx creds and a few other hard currencies from the local empires, bypassing the tyranny of electronic money. Only for the largest transactions did anybody resort to financial intermediaries, and the more trustworthy species managed to avoid banks completely through a combination of barter and promissory notes.
    “Here you are, sir, mind the thorns,” the girl cautioned as she handed him the roses and took the coin. “Will you be needing change, sir?”
    “Uh, I guess not,” Joe mumbled and quickly moved away from the petite mugger. Maybe electronic money had some advantages after all, but most of the galaxy’s denizens preferred hard cash for privacy reasons. Earth was the only planet he knew where people paid for items with their bulky communication devices, something that had slowed the adoption of the subvoc and translation implants that were otherwise omnipresent throughout civilized space. But he hadn’t been back to Earth in the twenty years since his parents were killed in a car accident and he shipped out as a mercenary, so maybe things had changed.
    The aroma from varied ingredients sizzling in hot woks filled the air as Joe reached Chinatown and headed to the Great Panda Pagoda, where the date was scheduled. He