Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network Page 17

  “As it happens, we’re lucky you signed up because one of the current council members who was planning to run again isn’t going to make it here in time,” Larry said, shuffling a few steps closer to the grill. “The anti-CoSHC candidates are all pretty young and nobody seems to know much about them. It would have been nice if their biographies were printed on the backs of the playing cards, but as my dad pointed out, that would have made them useless for poker.”

  “A pre-marked deck that everybody can read.” John snorted. “Did you prepare a speech for tonight?”

  “A journalist friend helped me write one. You?”

  “I’ve got a whole spiel I do for the casual agents I recruit for EarthCent Intelligence, and most of it applies.”

  “Do your best for humanity? That sort of thing?” Larry asked.

  “You’ve heard it?”

  “EarthCent is nothing if not consistent. Two burgers,” he told the woman working the grill. “All the fixings.”

  “Same for me,” John said. “Is everything…?”

  “Vergallian vegan,” the grill cook replied. “It’s the real stuff, not what you get on alien worlds.”

  “You know, we probably shouldn’t eat together,” Larry said after they paid for their food.

  “You’re right,” John agreed. “It’s an opportunity to sit with some strangers and maybe scare up a few votes. I guess I’ll see you when the speeches start. Do we put our names in a hat?”

  “Yes, they’ll announce it to everybody around an hour from now. Good luck.”

  The enormous hand-stitched dining hall tent that doubled as the main venue for speeches had obviously been manufactured on a tech-ban world in the Vergallian Empire. There were so many poles holding up the dark green canopy that it felt a bit like entering an old-growth forest that had been filled with hundreds of rows of folding tables and many thousands of folding chairs. John intentionally picked a table with just one open seat to maximize his number of fellow diners, and someone soon remarked on his yellow candidate ribbon.

  “They asked me to stand for a seat,” the young woman across from him said. “I told them that I’m against the council on principle. I mean, I get that Guild dues help make Rendezvous possible and pay the rental for this tent and such,” she added, pointing overhead with her fork, “but for me, it’s less about whether the Traders Guild joins the Conference of Sovereign Communities than about the price of ships.”

  “Did you say somebody tried recruiting you to run?” John asked.

  “A representative for the finance company that holds the mortgage on my Sharf trader suggested it. I finished my apprenticeship eight months ago, and I had enough saved for a down payment on a second-hand trader, but it turned out the Sharf are running out of them. The price is up more than twenty percent in just the last year. I had to partner up to get the deal done.”

  “The Sharf are running out of used two-man traders?”

  “That’s what the dealer in Earth orbit said,” a young man two spots to John’s left contributed. “I guess that after seventy or eighty years of demand, we’ve soaked up all of their excess inventory.”

  “I actually looked at a new model, but it costs five times as much, and the Sharf say we don’t live long enough to qualify for a mortgage,” the young woman across from John continued. “When the MORE reps approached me at Echo Station and asked me to run for the council, I told them I was too busy keeping up with my mortgage payments to spend my week at Rendezvous running for election. I got the feeling they might have offered me some kind of deal if we hadn’t been on my ship where the controller was recording everything, but after my experience with Advantage, I don’t trust anything those people say.”

  “Advantage sucks,” a different woman at the table commented. “It starts you off with some solid trade suggestions that are probably stolen from the Verlock’s Raider/Trader platform, but as soon as you’re willing to commit serious creds, it puts you into losing situations.” As the woman spoke, she held up a tab in one hand, swiping her way through the candidate selection until she matched John’s image with his face. “So what are you going to do about it, Mr. EarthCent Intelligence?”

  “Just so everybody understands, I’m running for the council because I want to see the Guild join CoSHC,” John replied. “But I can tell you that one of the main functions of EarthCent Intelligence is maintaining a database of businesses and services for our subscribers, and we’ve committed significant resources to investigate reports of shady refi deals and the factors contributing to a recent rise in mortgage defaults. In recent decades, the percentage of new traders failing their first year in business was below three percent, but in the past twelve months it’s spiked above sixteen percent. That’s not the sort of thing that goes unnoticed.”

  “So why haven’t you gotten to the bottom of it yet?”

  “Traders make up less than a tenth of a percent of Earth expatriates and we have to focus our limited resources where they’ll have the most impact,” John said. “We’re just getting a handle on the crooked labor contractors whose activities impact hundreds of millions of people, and our current focus is on sketchy operators in the space mining industry.”

  “Yeah, I pity the poor souls who go into asteroid prospecting,” an older man at the table interjected, and then he launched into a long story about a palladium find in the Hargreaves system that became more improbable by the minute.

  “Is that your story for the contest?” a young man interrupted the raconteur, who had paused for breath after explaining how he sealed a hull breach with a can of baked beans in heavy tomato sauce.

  “This really happened to me,” the storyteller replied, but he failed to maintain a straight face. “Or maybe it happened to my brother, it’s getting hard to remember with all the new details.”

  “Is that a synonym for embellishments?”

  “Hey, if the contest was about telling the truth, a robot would win every year.”

  “Attention all candidates,” a voice rang out from the speakers positioned high on every tent pole. “If you wish to take the stage tonight, it’s time to come up to the event desk and put your name in a hat. And will the owner of the Tyrellian gryphon with a sweet tooth please report to the event desk as well. Bring your programmable cred.”

  “That’s me,” John said, getting up from his spot. “I hope when it comes time to vote, you’ll remember my face.”

  “I’ll remember the expression on it when the announcer said, ‘Bring your programmable cred,’” the storyteller replied. “Your gryphon?”

  “Long story,” John said. “Don’t worry, I won’t be entering the Tall Tales contest.”

  A woman wearing a hat branded “Myka’s Chocolate Chip Cookies” was waiting at the desk with Semmi, who had a plastic bucket on her head.

  “Whoever stuck the bucket on my gryphon’s head better start running now,” John growled.

  “She already tried that once, but she ran into my table and dumped six trays of cookies on the ground,” the baker shot back. “Your gryphon put the bucket on all by herself.”

  “Oh, sorry about that. Are they salvageable?”

  “The cookies? They were individually wrapped so they’re fine.”

  “Then what do I owe you for? The bucket of—molasses?” he asked, reading the upside-down label.

  “No, the bucket was almost empty. She got into that fix licking it out.”

  “Then why the programmable cred?”

  “I was just trying to scare you off. If nobody claimed the gryphon, I would have kept her. She seems like a sweetheart.”

  “Then why didn’t you take the bucket off her head?” John asked.

  “It’s stuck,” Myka said. “I did poke some holes in it along the edge to make sure she can breathe, but I don’t really know how her head is shaped. I’ve never really seen a gryphon in the flesh before.”

  John crouched down in front of the winged lioness, who was acting very nonchalant about the whole affair
, though that might have been the aftereffect of knocking her head into a table. “You really can’t get that thing off yourself?” he asked.

  The bucket shook from side to side.

  “I can try pulling it off, but it might hurt. Less risky than cutting, though.”

  The wings shrugged.

  John sat on the ground and braced his feet against the gryphon’s shoulders, then grabbing the lip of the bucket on each side, began to pull. The bulge in the plastic wall of the bucket began to move slowly back from the bottom, and then the whole thing came free at once, propelling John into a backward somersault that he somehow ended on his feet.

  Everybody at the front of the tent burst into applause, and Semmi began to preen her ruffled feathers back into place.

  “You’ve got my vote,” a trader shouted, though John didn’t know if the pledge of support was for him or the gryphon.

  Another one of the diners matched John’s face to the candidate list on his tab and called out, “Does everybody who signs up with EarthCent Intelligence get a killer pet?”

  The gryphon snapped her beak at this remark, and John hastened to calm her. “He wasn’t talking about you, Semmi.”

  Larry tapped John’s shoulder to get his attention. “Putting your name in the hat? It looks like all thirteen anti-CoSHC candidates are already signed up, plus most of our side.”

  “Where’s the hat?”

  “Here,” Larry said, passing over a tab with a picture of a hat on the screen. “Just take a selfie and it will figure out the rest.”

  John held the tab in front of his face, angling it self-consciously for the least distorted image, and then he staggered as a heavy weight pushed on both shoulders and a beaked face with a lolling tongue appeared next to his own. He tapped the blinking button anyway, handed back the tab, and then pried the gryphon’s paws off his shoulders.

  “Down, Semmi,” he said, to reinforce the message.

  “Are you taking her on stage with you for the speech?” Larry asked.

  “Do you think it would be a good idea?”

  “People will certainly remember you,” the other trader said, returning the tab to the woman running the event desk. “If I was you, I’d swap that picture for the one they took at the registration desk.”

  “Can we do that?”

  “I already did it for mine. You just go to the page on your own tab, hit the ‘edit’ option, and scan your face for the password.”

  “I’ll do that tonight. When do we find out who speaks when?”

  “Right now,” the woman at the desk said. She swiped an option on the tab and the two dozen or so pictures all swirled together before rearranging themselves in a grid in ranked order. Then the event coordinator tapped a pin on the collar of her blouse and began to speak in the professional-announcer voice they had heard over the public address system a few minutes prior.

  “There are twenty-three candidates registered to speak tonight, and as this event is scheduled for two hours, each will be given five minutes maximum.” Then she began reading off the order, and John found himself stuck in the last slot, immediately following Larry.

  “What kind of random drawing was that?” Larry asked the women. “We were the last two candidates to sign up, and the first thirteen are all from the anti-CoSHC party.”

  “The early Dolly gets the Sheezle bug,” she replied philosophically. “You can always complain to the outgoing council.”

  The speeches didn’t start for another half hour, by which time at least two-thirds of the crowd had wandered off to the fair. The thirteen candidates from the anti-CoSHC party all proved to be attractive younger traders, and they offered up impressive, if somewhat similar speeches, every one of them starting with a joke and ending with a promise of independence and prosperity.

  The next eight speakers were all current council members standing for reelection, and they spoke in favor of joining the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities. By the time Larry’s turn came, the tent had begun filling up again for the storytelling contest that would follow, so going on near the end proved to be a blessing in disguise. Larry spent a couple of minutes talking about growing up in a trading family and his years operating his own ship. He concluded with a well-reasoned argument for why the best way for traders to ensure their continued independence was to have representation in CoSHC, which was one day likely to become the off-Earth government for most of humanity. Then he left the stage and John took his place, the gryphon following at his heel.

  “I’ll be the last candidate before we move on to the Tall Tales contest that I know you’re all really here for, so I’ll try to be brief,” John began.

  Semmi yawned ostentatiously, then curled up and covered her head with a wing, drawing a roar of laughter from the crowd.

  “Thank you, Semmi,” he continued. “There’s a story about a village on Earth, hundreds of years before the Stryx opening, where parents tried to choose who their children would marry. There was no greater shame in this community than when a child rejected that choice and ran off to escape parental control. When young people began disappearing from the village one after another, their families tried to keep it a secret so as not to be shunned by their neighbors. Nearly a year passed before a young woman made it home after escaping from the city where she’d been sold as a slave.”

  “The gryphon must have heard it before,” a heckler called out.

  “My point is, if the parents hadn’t been so intent on keeping their shame to themselves, the villagers would have figured out much quicker that slavers were kidnapping and selling their children. Independent traders fall into the same trap, holding our cargoes, costs, and travel plans close to the vest, because in one sense, we’re competing with each other. But in another sense, we’re all one family, and without sharing information, we can’t protect ourselves from coordinated attacks by forces that prey on independents.”

  “Are you trying to recruit informers for EarthCent Intelligence?” somebody shouted.

  “What I’m getting at is that the Conference of Sovereign Human Communities is, above all else, an information-sharing organization. For years they wouldn’t consider accepting the Traders Guild as a member, and some of us were angry about that, and maybe now that makes us want to reject their offer. But CoSHC is a player on the human stage in a way that the Guild alone can never be, and we’ll be stronger with them than on our own.” John paused a moment to gather his thoughts, and Semmi peered up at him from under her wing, as if to ask if he had finished.

  “That’s the first political speech I’ve ever made and I hope you enjoyed it more than the gryphon,” he concluded.

  Seventeen

  “Welcome home,” Larry greeted his paying passenger. “I was beginning to worry that you and my mom had decided to stay up there. I’ve heard that Flower can be very persuasive.”

  “It was a lot of fun,” Georgia said, and passed Larry a box that was surprisingly heavy for its size. “I don’t know where you want to keep this, but it’s a soaked fruitcake, a gift from Flower. Supposedly they’re best if aged for at least six months.”

  Larry opened the locker where he stored canned goods and wedged the cake into the top shelf. “Don’t let me forget it’s in there.”

  “I ran into a famous freelancer from the Galactic Free Press while we were on Flower, and she asked me to work with her on a story about traders refinancing their mortgages and losing their ships. Would it reflect badly on you if I tag along while you campaign and try to get interviews?”

  “I’m fine with it, and I can’t see anybody not voting for me because you’re doing research. They can always refuse to answer.”

  “Great. I’ll even kiss babies for you. Just let me grab a bite of breakfast first.”

  “Just hold that thought and come with me. Our first stop this morning is Fanny’s Famous Pancake Breakfast. It’s an annual event at Rendezvous and all of the candidates are expected to show up. Fanny’s like a hundred years old.”


  “Don’t let her hear you say that,” the freelancer advised. She topped off her large purse with felt-tipped markers printed ‘Vote for Larry, Phil’s son,’ and then followed the candidate down the ladder from the bridge and out the cargo hatch. Larry ordered the controller to secure the ship and led them deeper into the campground. “How can you tell where we’re going?” Georgia asked.

  “Fanny and her family operate a converted Drazen supply ship she traded for around thirty years ago. It’s the tallest ship in the trade fleet. See?” He pointed at a vessel that stood head and shoulders above the surrounding ships, most of which were of the two-man Sharf variety.

  “It’s huge,” Georgia marveled. “I didn’t know humans were allowed to operate ships that big.”

  “There aren’t any rules about ownership, it’s just a matter of what we can afford,” Larry explained. “Fanny is old enough to be one of the original independent traders and she’s smart enough to have made a lot of money. Rather than retiring, she put her creds into a ship with twenty decent-size cabins and plenty of room for cargo. Everybody you see serving pancakes today is a member of her family.”

  Somebody had rented a hundred folding picnic tables for the event, but even so, there were plenty of people left eating while they stood. That worked well for the candidates, who preferred to circulate and meet as many people as possible. Georgia took advantage to keep asking younger traders about refinancing until she came across a young man who was more than eager to share his story.

  “I’m Daryl, and I’ll talk on the record,” he told her immediately. “Those bastards stole my ship on Braaken while I was at the local trade grounds. When I got back—”

  “Hold on a second,” Georgia begged him. “Do you mind if I record this on my tab?”

  “Please do,” Daryl said, and waited for her to get out her Galactic Free Press tab and set the mode. “As I was saying, I was trading on Braaken, and when I got back to the parking area, my ship was gone with all my stuff on board. At first I thought it had been jacked by choppers, but there was—”