The Bandit Buyout

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Hypercomm™ Transmission:

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Galactic News Report

2189.26.2 EY

  • New Chief Executive Promises Expansion of Human Territory
    • Danielle Amesbury has been the Chief Executive of the Earth Oligarchy for only thirteen weeks. In that time, she has already made it clear that her Executiveship will be focused on one thing and one thing only; human expansion into the interior of the galaxy. In a briefing earlier this week, her spokesperson stated that drone ship lines will be extended past the 58 Galactic East-West line by 2191, and that all of these new trade routes will be defended by a new generation of Defense Force ships. Logistics experts have questioned the feasibility of such an endeavor, but the administration insisted that, “Scopicuity™ is up to the task. We’ve never seen a better logistics planning A.I.” Regardless of the outcome, Amesbury’s office seems confident that they will succeed in expanding Earth Oligarchy territory.

 

“What are you doing this far out?”

“Prospecting.”

“Huh.”

“Yup.”

“Don’t talk much?”

“I never need to say much.”

“How about your name?”

“Johanne.”

“Johanne… Think I’ve met a Johanne before. Not a prospector though…” The bartender wiped the inside of a glass with a stained rag, his unkempt beard twitching as he tried to place the name. “Think he was a research aid to some hotshot bio-mech scientist.”

“Sounds like a shitty job,” Johanne scoffed.

“Prospecting is a shitty job. At least research aids get to lounge around in a climate controlled ship.”

“My ship is climate controlled.”

“Bet the last place you scavenged was some rocky hell without an ounce of O2 in the entire atmosphere.”

“Sounds about right,” Johanne said, swigging the rest of his rept-ale.

The bartender nodded and pulled over the printer nozzle to fill up Johanne’s glass. “More rept-ale?” he said, clearly fighting a smile.

“Let’s try another vintage.”

“Not a fan of the Tex’xtzu ‘81?”

“A Bunja.”

“We only have a pattern for the ‘87.”

“That’ll have to do.”

Johanne sipped his rept-ale in relative peace. At one point, there was a Kextan that started howling at a trader in the other end of the bar. It was common enough that it didn’t bug Johanne much. As he watched the scene though, he couldn’t help but wonder whether the Kextan was male or female. It was like every Kextan he had ever seen, a big lizard with leathery mud-brown skin, beady wide-set eyes, and unhingable four-jawed mouth that made him queasy. After a while he stopped trying to guess, and focussed back on his drink.

Rept-ale was a velvety green-gold, liquid. What he was drinking wasn’t real rept-ale, the stuff Triloxians slaved over in the sweltering heat of Bunja colony jungles. It was just printed crap that barely tasted like licorice. Even still, there was something about the slightly creamier Bunja ales that reminded him of when his dad used to make hot chocolate for him when he was young enough to still be afraid of the eternal nothingness of space.

“Think I saw your ship earlier today, one that just docked?” The bartender said, knocking the trader back into the dingy space-station bar.

“Yeah. We just got in from the Vecia system,” Johanne muttered into the brim of his glass.

“Vecia,” the bartender barked, oblivious to Johanne’s attempt at some semblance of privacy. “Why so far out there?”

“I have an interest in a regional legend.” Johanne looked around the room again before continuing. The loud Kextan from earlier had left, so had the scruffy trader in the broad brimmed hat that had been skulking in the corner. “One about a lost ship.”

“Lots of those,” the bartender said impassively.

“None like this.”

“A unicorn, eh?”

“Quite the unicorn.”

“How’d a scavenger like you hear about a unicorn?”

“My dad had an interest in it… These things get passed down I guess.”

The bartender put the glass he was cleaning down and picked up another one. It had to have been the fifth glass the bartender had cleaned out since he started talking to Johanne, which made the trader wonder whether he was wiping out the same few glasses over and over again. After a few moments, the bartender scrunched up his face until he looked more like a Dubverian bulldog than a person. He then clawed at his beard with his rag hand, trying to remember some old ship captain’s tale.

“Huh,” the bartender said at last, “heard about a unicorn a while back. Rare alien vessel, a Cybie one I think.”

“This unicorn isn’t from the Automata… We already know about them.”

“Don’t know much about the Cybies. Take your word for it.”

Johanne had heard all kinds of stories since he was a kid, most of which were about wrecked ships or bandits or exotic alien worlds. They all blended together after a while, except for the ones about the ship he was after. The Dentran ship legend was an old classic at this point. No one knew exactly how the rumor started, or what the actual facts were. There were so many different Holocomm tales about the ship that every detail was disputed, from where crashed to the color of the hull. The trader swirled his glass, causing the light to dance off of the speckled green-gold liquid inside it. He had always imagined that the Dentran ship was a green-gold color, but like anybody else’s version of the tale, it was just speculation. Ultimately, nobody knew anything about the Dentrans.

 

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