Date Night on Union Station by E. M. Foner Read Free Book Online Page A

the cold sank into her bones, then the reassuring voice of the station’s Stryx librarian broke in with, “…jamming, but tracking. Please report status.”
    “I’m trapped in a seat pod, isolation cover down, freezing. I think I’m being put into stasis. It’s an Eemas date, check the records.” Kelly banged her hands on the glass to no avail, but she saw Olaf dragging himself forward towards the front of the ship on his magnetic traction cleats. “Scramble fighters or something. Stop them.”
    “Fighters?” Despite her rapidly dimming consciousness, Kelly thought she could hear Libby chuckling. That’s right, they don’t have any, she remembered. “Don’t worry, Kelly. We suspected there was a bride-stealing gang working the station, we just needed them to violate our regulations. I’ve already arranged for apprehension and retrieval. Help is on the way.”
    “You used me as date bait?” Kelly mumbled incredulously, lacking the energy to get angry about it as she felt herself drifting into sleep. “That wasn’t very nice. Please turn off the freezer.”
    “You’ll be safer in stasis, Kelly. We’ll have to disable the ship. Sleep well.” Libby closed the channel softly.
    As everything faded to black, Kelly reflected that this, surely, was the new low point of her dating life.

Five
     
    “Somebody’s coming,” Paul yelled into the jagged opening in the lifeboat hull, from which emitted an unending stream of curses and oddly colored wisps of smoke. The volume of curses increased even as the smoke died out, and a helmeted head with a dark visor poked out of the hull.
    “Stupid auto-adjusting shield,” Joe complained as he rapped the side of the welding helmet a couple of times with his glove-encased knuckles. Finally he gave up and raised the visor manually. “Where’s Killer?”
    “Sleeping,” Paul replied and shrugged his shoulders at the pointless question. Beowulf, aka Killer, was a war dog, a genetically engineered cross between a mastiff and Huravian hound. The dog had chosen to stick with Joe when he left the mercenaries, and anybody who might have disagreed with the canine’s choice had more sense than to argue with him.
    Beowulf looked exactly like a war dog retired to junkyard duty. He weighed as much as a big man, drooled buckets, and mainly slept whenever Joe or Paul was around to keep watch. At the sound of his name, Beowulf’s ears twitched and he opened his eyes. After a quick sniff and glance at the approaching robot, he made an elaborate show of curling up and going back to sleep in a nest of scrapped insulation he had arranged as a bed away from bed.
    Joe left his cutting torches and gauntlets behind, pulled himself out of the lifeboat, and handed the helmet to Paul. Then he straightened out painfully and cast a critical eye over the strange amalgamation of parts that rolled up to him under its own power.
    “This is a first,” Joe said, as he untied the straps securing his leather welder’s apron. “I’ve never had a robot come to junk itself before.”
    “How very droll,” the robot responded with the pointed inflection peculiar to the Stryx. Its various articulated limbs undulated wildly about, like a blind octopus groping for the wheel on a submarine hatch. “About what I should have expected from a man who would take a second-hand dating subscription in barter.”
    “Oh, you’re the guy from Eemas. That’s a dirty trick you folks have, charging the full subscription price just to change the user profile!” Joe intended to work himself up for a tirade, but became hypnotized watching the apparently uncontrollable spasms of the robot’s extremities.
    “I’m sure it was explained to you that the cost of the service is the research that goes into finding potential matches.” The robot shifted to a tired monotone that suggested too much time spent doing customer service. “We offered you a very attractive alternative, and I understand you were quite