Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network Read online

  “Remember, it’s on me,” Larry said. “If you’re worried about timing, eat the salad now and take the sandwich with you.”

  “How about your spaghetti?”

  “This? Stop asking me questions and it will be gone in two minutes.”

  Five minutes later, Larry washed down the last forkful of spaghetti with a swallow of his orange drink, and Georgia gave up any semblance of trying to keep pace. While he went to the register to pay with his programmable cred, she wrapped the remaining half of her sandwich in a napkin.

  “It’s just down the corridor,” Larry told her on his return. “They’re holding the presentation in one of the large service bays because it’s the only place with enough room.”

  Somebody had made a real effort to clean up the bay, though they couldn’t do much to make the badly scratched deck plates look any better. Colorful bunting was strung along the bulkheads and from the ceiling, and a portable audio/visual system with a holographic projector had been set up on a raised platform at the front of the bay. There were a few folding chairs available for older audience members, but the attendees mainly sat on the floor or stood to the sides.

  The audience burst into applause as theme music swelled from the speakers, and Georgia found herself clapping just as enthusiastically as the rest of them. The presenters on stage were all dressed in colorful Colony One uniform tops, which were copied from the same old Earth television show that supplied the music. When the initial round of enthusiasm waned, a grey-haired woman tapped an insignia on her chest that apparently served as a microphone, and just managed to announce, “Space. The fi—” before she was drowned out by the audience shouting the rest of the well-known line.

  The reporter found herself tempted to cover her ears with her hands to block out all of the noise that followed. When the cheering and hooting finally ran its course and the presenter launched into her introduction, the lack of subsequent interruptions made Georgia suspect that she had witnessed a clever strategy to let the attendees vent their pent-up emotions so they would calm down and pay attention.

  “Welcome to the Colony One traveling roadshow, as we like to call it, and I want to take a moment to clear up any misconceptions,” the speaker began. “We are not a cult, the doors are not locked, and we encourage you to use the facilities if nature calls. We won’t be accepting any money, so please don’t offer. Our mission is to collect contact information and pledges from everybody who is interested in supporting the acquisition and fitting-out of a colony ship capable of sustaining four to six million humans and their livestock in space while searching for a habitable world.”

  Something like a flash of gold came arcing out of the crowd and hit the stage near the woman. Georgia flinched, wondering if it was an attack. But the presenter just smiled and said, “Please keep your jewelry on as well. This reminds me of the time I was on a Drazen open world and a local human farmer tried to present us with a pair of breeding goats. He had the right idea for colony ship livestock, but in life, as in comedy, timing is everything. Here to speak to you about timing, my colleague, Dollyman.”

  The audience gave a polite round of applause as a tall man wearing a sports jacket with two extra sleeves sewn across the chest moved to the front of the platform. The new speaker had a tab in his hand, and he used it to activate the holographic projector. A Dollnick colony ship filled the space above the stage, spinning on its axis just as it would to create weight for the inhabitants on a mission.

  “I don’t have a clue why they call me Dollyman,” the presenter began, eliciting a laugh from the attendees, “but I can tell you that I often feel like the luckiest man in the galaxy. A little over thirty years ago I left Earth as a contract worker for a janitorial job that promised good benefits. What nobody had told me was that I would be one of the first humans employed in Prince Drume’s orbital shipyards. By the end of my contract, I’d pushed a sonic broom over every square centimeter of a Dollnick colony ship under construction.”

  The hologram slowly swiveled by ninety degrees, so that most of the audience was now seeing a flat end of the cylindrical vessel. Dollyman continued tapping away on his tab, and layers of the hologram vanished, one after another until all that was left resembled a spoked wheel without a tire.

  “What you’re looking at is a single section of a Dollnick colony ship without the decks,” the presenter continued. “There’s no cut-and-dried rule for how many sections a ship can have, though I’ve been told there’s a theoretical limit beyond which the center of gravity begins to create structural complications. The spoke-and-hub design is common to practically all large space structures that host biologicals, including Stryx stations, because a multiple-deck centrifuge is the only practical way to create so-called ‘artificial gravity’ in space. But my goal here isn’t to get into the physics of space construction, which I’m hardly qualified to discuss in any case. Does anybody want to guess how long it takes a Dollnick construction crew to complete a section from this stage?”

  “A year,” somebody called out.

  “A decade,” a different voice chipped in.

  “Five and a half years,” a mathematically oriented person ventured, splitting the difference between the first two guesses to maximize his chances of being closest to the correct answer.

  “What if I told you the longest guess was off by more than an order of magnitude?” Dollyman said.

  “What’s an order of magnitude?” a youngster in the front row asked.

  “A factor of ten.”

  “You mean it takes less than a year?”

  “Actually, construction of a single section takes several times a hundred years, and while Dollnicks live longer than that, it’s not unusual for a shipyard worker to pass an unfinished construction job along to his son. Of course, an orbital shipyard like Prince Drume’s can build a large number of sections at the same time, that’s just a question of available workers and materials. The point is, from soup to nuts, building a Dollnick colony ship may take a thousand years.”

  Georgia heard gasps from the crowd around her, and she had the odd feeling that a good deal of the air had just been sucked from the room. She was recording the presentation audio with her tab, but her fingers tapped away almost mechanically on the virtual keyboard, taking notes about the hologram on display and the scale of the work.

  “Disappointed, right?” Dollyman continued. “For those of you who wonder why we aren’t talking about building our own colony ship or raising the money to commission aliens to build one for us, there’s your answer. Colony ships are one of the milestone achievements of advanced species, and the costs are, if you’ll excuse the pun, astronomical. But, there is another option, the one we’re here to talk to you about today. Sally?”

  The grey-haired woman returned to the front of the stage. Dollyman passed her the tab and then stood to the side. Sally swiped at the screen, and the hologram of the Dollnick colony ship section was replaced by a somewhat smaller cylindrical vessel that looked like it had been through the wars.

  “This is the Chorp, a Class B Drazen colony ship that was recently towed into a Sharf recycling orbital for scrapping. The jump drive is a pile of slag, the environmental systems have been shut down for hundreds of years, and at some point the asteroid deflection system was scavenged for another vessel, leading to multiple impacts. Before you ask, we aren’t bidding on the Chorp. The reason I’m showing you this hologram is that I’ve seen the Drazen estimate for restoring this ship to liveable condition, and it came to a half a trillion creds.”

  This time the audience groaned, but the presenter continued relentlessly.

  “That’s right. If one in twenty humans alive today coughed up a thousand creds each, humanity could be the proud owner of an empty Drazen colony ship capable of moving approximately two million of us to a new home.”

  “So what are we doing here?” a new voice cried out in disgust.

  “I’m glad you asked that question,” Sally said. “The purpose of
the Colony One movement is to make humanity aware of the sacrifices required to become a true space-faring species, sacrifices we were never called on to make because of our early admission to the tunnel network. That’s the tough-love part of our presentation, but now let me show you what awaits us, or rather our grandchildren, if we back our words with deeds.”

  The rest of the presentation, large parts of which were licensed from Grenouthian documentary producers, took the audience through the range of missions colony ships were capable of performing. Georgia had always thought that these giant vessels were basically moveable space farms that provided a temporary home to emigrants, but it turned out that they were worlds in miniature, intended to preserve a full civilization.

  “What happens if after generations in space, the best world a colony ship finds is already occupied?” somebody asked during one of the breaks for questions.

  “If the colony ship belongs to a tunnel network species, they would be bound by Stryx rules,” Colony One’s legal expert replied. “Before you ask, the number of possible scenarios is mind-boggling, but in all cases, the first step is to contact the Stryx, who would send a science ship to evaluate the situation.”

  “What if the colony ship wasn’t sent by a tunnel network species?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Eleven

  “Morning,” Marshall greeted Ellen. “Nice to have you back.”

  “I’m surprised you’re still here,” she said, spreading her blanket next to his. “I’ve been all over the planet the last couple weeks, but I thought you’d had enough of Earth for the time being.”

  “I left the day after we met and I returned this morning,” he said, rising to help her unload the rented floater, which was piled high with goods from her ship. “I did a Moon run and then decided to come back until I leave the system for Rendezvous.”

  “I’ve never been to the Moon. What’s it like for trade?”

  Marshall shrugged. “A little of this, a little of that. About the same as what you’d see at any moon colony. My older brother leases a crater there that he’s turned into a greenhouse. His wife is a botanist and it’s sort of their retirement dream.”

  “You mean a crater, as in—” Ellen spread her hands as if she were describing the fish that got away.

  “Not that big,” he replied with a laugh, and returned to the floater for another load. “What did your proprietary trading platform suggest to you this time?”

  “They’re still pushing disposable stunners and tablecloths,” she said in disgust. “I decided to bring everything they recommended over the last three months to clean house before Rendezvous.”

  “Fire sale?”

  “Pretty much. I’ve got enough data for the piece I’m writing. Now I just need to round it out by getting some interviews with other traders who have used the Advantage platform. I’ll do that at Rendezvous.”

  “Did you get any trading done in the last two weeks?”

  “The truth is I was too busy meeting with journalists. It looks like the replacement news syndicate I was telling you about is going to become a reality.”

  “Does that mean you’re in line for a promotion?” Marshall asked, helping her set out an array of Horten art glass.

  “I messaged my boss I wasn’t ready to give up the trader’s life to become a full-time editor, so the paper made up a new job title for me. Meet the new Earth Syndication Coordinator.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I’m on the hook to return here once a month for the next year and meet with correspondents about projects they want to sell us. By pre-buying stories from investigative journalists, the Galactic Free Press will have some control over the syndication feed, rather than just taking whatever comes up. It’s sort of like middle-management, I guess, but at least I have the rest of the month to myself.”

  “Smart of your boss,” Marshall observed. “If they had hired somebody from Earth, it would have meant an office and hiring support staff.”

  “You were in the business?” Ellen asked. She dismissed the rented floater and started unpacking all of the smaller items she’d brought.

  “Not the newspaper business, the distribution business. And it was a long time ago, but my memory is that one manager leads to another, and before you know it, you have a whole office of people making work for each other.”

  “Excuse me,” an athletic-looking man in his forties interrupted them. “Is that a genuine paddle-cup-mitt-ball set?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marshall said, returning to his own blanket and picking up the boxed set to better display it to the customer. “It’s competition-grade, never used, and you can see Prince Gruer’s seal on the flap.”

  “I’ve been looking for one of these since I moved back to Earth, but all I’ve found are cheap knock-offs.”

  “I took this one in trade at the elevator hub on Jufe Two, an ag world in the—”

  “I worked there for twenty years,” the man cut off the explanation. “Sometimes I’m not sure why I ever left. May I?” The trader handed over the bulky package and the customer inspected the seal and nodded. “How much?”

  “Let’s call it an even hundred.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you how long I’ve been looking for one of these,” the man grumbled, but he held out a programmable cred. “A competition set didn’t cost forty creds back on Jufe.”

  The trader slotted the coin into his mini-register and frowned. “You’re short.”

  “I thought it would save time haggling. Can you do eighty-seven? That’s our team’s programmable cred and my wife will kill me if I add my own money.”

  Marshall grimaced as he keyed in the transaction, and the customer gave his voice confirmation.

  “Thanks,” the ex-ag worker said. “At least you know the set is going to a good home.”

  After the customer moved off with his prize, Ellen asked, “How did you know there would be any demand for a paddle-cup-mitt-ball set on Earth? You need four arms to play.”

  “The leagues on Earth just double the number of players per position, but I’ve seen humans on Dollnick open worlds wearing prosthetic arm sets,” Marshall replied. “I had the feeling that I could get the best price for the set on Earth because there’s not enough demand here for anybody to have started importing them. Sporting equipment is a low-risk proposition in most cases, and if there’s an official seal, it’s as good as cash.”

  “Before I started using the Advantage platform, I specialized in craft goods,” Ellen told him, casting a mournful look at the commodity merchandise spread around her blanket. “Some of the art supplies barely weigh anything, and if I spread enough sparkles on the blanket, children would drag their parents over and I could make a killing on crayons and stickers. I did really well with sewing supplies too, especially the alien gear.”

  “And then you decided to throw away your money and time trying to chase the crowds?”

  “It’s for a story. I can afford to experiment more than most traders with a mortgage because the Galactic Free Press is pretty generous with freelancers. I just wish I could come up with a name for what the Advantage platform is promoting. Follow the leader? Me-too mercantilism?”

  “Cash-crop syndrome,” her neighbor suggested, redistributing the remaining merchandise on his own blanket to cover the bare spot left by the paddle-cup-mitt-ball set. “The older traders I know, every cred we earned that didn’t go into feeding ourselves or paying customs bribes went to the ship’s mortgage. We counted our wealth in goods, not coins, and the whole ‘barter is better’ thing wasn’t just a tunnel network slogan for us, it was a way of life. But somebody starts offering young traders easy credit and it turns into a race for cash.”

  “Did you just make that up, or is it a real syndrome?” Ellen asked. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  “It’s not a medical condition if that’s what you mean, but cash-crop farming started not far from here a few hundred years ago. Joint-stock companies
started pooling capital to build canals, which were soon replaced by railroads, and the next thing you knew, family farms that hadn’t ever been in debt were all working for the bank.”

  “Because they had to pay for the railroads?”

  “The railroads changed the whole business model of farming. Instead of feeding the family and raising some extra livestock for cash to pay for luxuries, farmers turned to monoculture and started planting whatever they thought would maximize the income from their land. You had whole regions growing just a couple of crops, or specializing in pigs and chickens because the railroads made it possible to reach the big cities. But efficiency has its price, and farmers who put all of their eggs in one basket could be wiped out by a drought, a disease, or worse, by a bumper crop depressing the price for the one product they had to sell.”

  “Kind of like traders following the advice from Advantage and showing up on some planet with the same goods as everybody else. Are you from a farm family?”

  “Read a few books about it in Zero-G,” Marshall said with a grin. “Family farms are actually making a comeback on Earth now. The alien exporters don’t like buying from factory farms, and they’re not as obsessed with scaling up single product lines as our own exporters. Say ‘Drazen Foods’ and everybody thinks hot peppers, but they actually try to sell every Earth ingredient in the All Species Cookbook.”

  “How much for one of those tablecloths?” a woman asked, pointing at the small pile Ellen had set out without much hope.

  “What’s the best price you’ve seen today?”

  “Forty-two,” the woman replied. “There’s a trader—”

  “Forty if you buy right now. I’m not interested in getting caught in a bidding war,” Ellen said gruffly.

  “How about quantity three?”

  “Are you a retailer?”

  “I’ve got a mother and a sister. If I had a retail shop, I would have asked the price for the whole stack.”

  “How about one ten?” Ellen offered.

  “All I’ve got is a hundred.”