I was tending to my corals when the message came.
Weak, tentative, low-powered, quiet, and – to be brutally honest – somewhat garbled and oddly-worded. But the intent was clear: there was a job for me.
So I sighed through my fronds and my currents and set things in motion. Engines roiled, metal shifted, computers hummed, and the wonderful, impossible, titanic mass of technology and power that was the shield between my ecosystem and the endless nothing was on a new course and preparing to once again spit in the eye of every law of physics ever discovered.
An interstellar trucker’s job was never done.
***
I flushed my tank out as I approached the signal’s source: some backwater dive in the ass end of a spiral arm. I’d need a clear head from this, however tempting the headiness of slight anoxia might seem at the prospect of a briefing from a freshly-orbit-capable potentate. They were all the same: carefully obsequious, polite, frightened but trying not to show it in case it spread, so on and so on. It was all part of the job but riptides I got tired of it sometimes. At least asteroids and planetesimals don’t try to talk to you when you’re moving them.
So when I arrived in-system and headed towards a watery little smudge of stones and magma, broadcasting a generic hi-how-are-you message that anything smarter than one of my fish would catch on to, I wasn’t quite prepared for my first reply to be “finally! What kept you?”
Which is what it was.
“Traffic,” I said without thinking. My erstwhile customers had relatively unexpressive faces; limited facial musculature and a thin coat of feathers (and a total lack of marine ecological surface features such as a robust reef like myself could count on) kept their social signals to their body language and low-pitched voices. But everything about this one screamed ‘impatient,’ down to the slightly bared teeth at the very tip of her enormous snout.
“Really,” she said.
“Yeah. Traffic. The main-lanes out here don’t get used much, and all it takes is one other guy going the same way and you both produce paragravitational drag, which-”
“Well, you’re here. You ARE here, right? You’re an interstellar object relocator, right? You’re ready to do business, right?”
I felt my kelp twist in annoyance. “You are correct. You’ve heard word of my services and pass-codes from-”
“Creditors, yes.”
Oh wonderful. “This is the most common method of trans-spatial contact for my services.” Because what made me money eventually made THEM money. The little bastards had built my cybernetic interface back when the fastest I could travel was measured in meters per decade; and I was still in hock to them for gracing me with the gift of personal locomotion. Friendly, courteous, souls of discretion, always eager to find a daring young sapient on the up-and-up and give them a hand with a mighty big bill in it.
“Clearly. Now, let’s get down to trimmed claws: we need a rock.”
“A rock?”
“Yes. A stone. A bolide. A chunk.”
“You might want to be more specific; this may be a translation issue, but ‘rock’ appears to be a somewhat vag-”
“We want a mass of easily-accessible nickel and iron, but not just the bulk stuff; plenty of platinum-groups too. Palladium and rhodium would be nice, but iridium is a MUST – damned stuff is too scarce down here.”
I burbled my bivalves at her. “Wow, someone’s eager to start on quasimaterial projects. You’re planning to leave orbit already?”
“You aren’t being paid for your opinions. Do you require directions to the asteroid belt, or…?”
“No.”
And I might not be paid for them but opinions I had nevertheless: this was a cluster of groundbound knuckleheads still fresh off the high of projecting full influence over their biosphere who’d been unlucky enough to run into the Creditors before they’d even gotten their own intrasystem mining program running and now had talked themselves into thinking they were just skipping all the boring stuff and getting ahead of the competition. What competition? Plenty of room out there for everyone.
“Good. Mission briefing will be handled by the Secretary for Economic Action. Get moving.”
And with that my glorious first contact with yet another species of assholes came to a close.
***
My vessel had already bent half of local time and space around its nose-mount before the second connection came through.
“Greetings, secretary.”
“Under-secretary,” corrected the individual, who was smaller, paler, and twitchier than the… damn, I’d never asked what their leader was called. Big boss? “The Secretary for Economic Action’s time is precious and he personally delegated this task to me. It is of vital importance that the bolide you are securing contain a high percentage of cobalt. This is your top priority; all other mineral and economical concerns are secondary.”
I sloshed my tides in consternation. “Really? First I’ve heard of it, but alrighty. Consider it done. Anything else?”
“Yes. This flowprint should contain all the information you will need.”
“Thanks.”
He hung up, I had my systems dissect the primitive filing system and disarm the many, many secretive viruses, bugs, and tracking systems embedded within it and I began ignoring it at once before I was interrupted.
Another connection? “Hello.”
“Hello yourself, my good sapient, saviour of our planetary situation.” The speaker was… well, prodigious. In every sense. I was impressed despite myself, if only by whatever life-support system was keeping her going. “I am Head Representative of the Laurasian Financial Source, and I have been elected to transmit the fine parameters of your mission to you.”
“Uh-huh? Thought I already had those.”
She clacked her jaws dismissively, creating shockwaves through wobbly tissues. “Pfew. High-level stuff. Bureaucratic oversight. Plans made by people with no expertise of how to solve real problems that society REALLY wants handled. For instance, I bet while they were trying to sell you on the importance of dabbling in all sorts of outlandish, implausible technologies through the use of who-knows-what precious metals they never ONCE imagined telling you of the importance of securing organic enrichment materials and water!”
“Yep,” I said.
“And of course, as our poor dear world suffers under the heel of volcanic activity and perhaps a few unforeseen and insignificant by-products of our valuable and necessary job-creating industries, such substances would be of utmost value in the future.”
“Yep,” I said.
“So there’s a flowprint headed your way now. You’re welcome. The Tyrant Queen will deny this conversation happened if you ask her because it’s all so very, very important to her. You do understand?”
“Yeeeeep,” I said, and killed the line dead. This time I didn’t even bother to open the file before jettisoning it.
Ten minutes later a third flowprint arrived without prior communication. After careful sterilization, it contained orders from the Secretary for Economic Action, who insisted that my entire contract hinged upon providing them with a bolide as much tungsten as possible at any cost imaginable for the highest stakes conceivable.
I found them a nice iron-nickel asteroid with iron, nickel, and plenty of iridium. When in doubt, satisfy the first person to talk to you – and more importantly, just pick the first thing you find.
***
The rock I’d found was a real brute beast of a thing; solid and ugly and shaped kind of but not really like my ship, which it doubled in length if not quite by breadth. It was still the friendliest company I’d had since I crawled out here for this job, and I appreciated the depth and stimulation of the conversation it provided me during the para-week it took my vessel to twist itself back through space and into the planet’s orbit once again.
I parked myself and the cargo at standard holding distance for heavy orbital construction and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.
Then I dropped every rule of galactic contractor courtesy and custom and phoned them myself.
“Yes?” said the creature on the other end, presumably the Tyrant Queen. It probably was the same one even; I’d only been gone twelve years.
“Yeah, it’s me. Job’s done.”
“Oh yes! That. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And you’ve brought us our manganese and copper then?”
Every single one of my shoals snapped its mouth at the same time. “No. You asked for –”
“An inexcusable breach of contract,” said the Tyrant Queen, with the sort of quiet, laid-back fury that had clearly been well-planned. “I can’t believe this treatment. No progress updates and-”
I didn’t cut the connection, but I did stop paying attention because the actual words weren’t the important part of the message, which was that I was being distracted from something very thoroughly. Presumably I was being screwed, which I’d expected, but also framed, which I hadn’t. Silly me thinking that the entire species was simply composed of self-centered and backstabbing short-sighted power-mongers with no interest in the common good; this was clearly a prearranged scheme.
The barrage of threats seemed to be dying down, so it was probably the time where I should say something.
“Ahem,” I said. I’d always hated that noise; I either had no throats at all or ten billion of them, depending on how you counted, and it gave me a headache either way every time I considered the implications. But it was pan-galactic standard verbalized posturing, so like it or lump it I had to live with it.
“What is it?” asked the Tyrant Queen, who sounded worn but relaxed after getting that out of her system.
“My fee,” I prompted. By this point my real payment would be never talking to them, but I still had standards.
“Oh yes, yes, yes. Your fee. It’s being sent to you right now.”
“Oh. Wonderful. Thirty percent of the minerals?”
“Thirty percent. Maybe thirty-five. The division operation is underway and should be there shortly.”
“I see.” And I did. One, two, three, four hundred separate ballistic trajectories, curving up through the atmosphere like the dancing duel-fish sparring above my conches. “You are very generous.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. And hung up.
I watched the oncoming missiles transfixed perfectly between paralyzing laughter and total numbness: here I was – contracted by assholes, through assholes; given contradictory work orders; framed for intragovernmental politics; and then fired on by what appeared to be crude but functional nuclear warheads. If I weren’t so annoyed I’d contact the customers again just to ask for another one. They were the greatest comedy act I’d ever seen.
The course of action was clear: professionalism or spite. I did what I always did when faced with a choice of this magnitude and consequence and watched the waves tug at my planktonic masses, picked a random patch of spawn, and made my choice based on whether I’d sorted them as pattern-group A or pattern-group Q.
It was Q, so I let my vessel spit in the eye of every law of physics ever discovered by sliding gently and masslessly to one side and watched as every single one of the warheads detonated against the asteroid instead, bopping it as firmly as a mother whale would smack a shark.
“Haha. Yes.”
It listed, spun, tumbled, and began to lurch inevitably into the planet’s gravity well.
“Well. What.”
***
I watched the asteroid descend as a half-fragmented incandescent jumble of hell with a combination of haplessness, vague remorse, and tentative schadenfreude. It slammed into a carbonate sea shelf, vaporizing most of it on impact and pumping the atmosphere full of enough engagingly sulfurous products and by-products to… well.
Suffice it to say that even without the wildfires igniting half the surface and the global dust clouds, this planet was in for some rough times. Even a species with a fully developed orbital superstructure array would consider this the end of an era. My erstwhile customers, by contrast, were completely fucked, along with most organisms complex enough to realize that Very Bad Things were happening to them.
Riptides and shit on a shoal, I hated jobs like this. No pay, no references, and the guilt of another mass extinction on my sponges and conscience alike. It hadn’t looked like a half-bad planet, too, apart from its rulers. Still, there was plenty of lifetime left for it before its atmosphere was stripped away by its bloating sun’s senescence.
Maybe I could hit the place back up in a hundred million years or so, see if anyone less irascible and hasty had evolved. I mean, what were the odds this could happen twice?
My computer tried to show me them and I immediately stopped it, burbled to myself, trimmed down my gas saturation to induce a pleasantly light anoxia, and began to wander back to home: nowhere in particular.