My Angel of the Dawn (WomanxBoy, ManxBoy, Sci-Fi + Romance)

***21***

The captain of the Hyppolita reestablished contact thirteen months after his ship had plunged into the Easter star-cluster. Word of his resurfacing had spread through the outer rim in less than twenty four standard hours. Nelsa learned about Nergan's return a few days later, when the Aurora had came out of the hyperspace. She slapped her palm on the data terminal and laughed, "Damn you to seven hells, you lucky bastard!"

Heixis the canteen-owner dutifully conveyed to her all the rumors traveling in all directions almost with the speed of light: a) the Hyppolita had been crawling along with only one working engine out of four, her cargo hold brimming with amazing alien artifacts; b) the Hyppolita's life support had failed, and the crew had made it in spacesuits; c) the whole crew had come down with the space plague — alternatives were that only Nergan had come down with the plague, and had gone mad as well, the whole crew had gone mad, half of the crew had gone mad, and other half had mutated into monsters, and so on.

Nelsa knew the truth behind such rumors, or rather the lack of it. She had been the subject of them more often than not. Only the talk of Nergan's countless riches might have held a grain of truth. She knew him all too well. Nergan would have never returned without a good booty. Nelsa soon proved to be right. But she had never imagined the actual value of Nergan's booty was so enormous. No one had. It was simply beyond human imagination.

Nergan had landed neither on Cendar, nor on any other known smugglers' outpost. He went straight to the holders of the biggest art auction in the United Colonies and offered them an insultingly low broker's fee. Upon making an inventory of the Hyppolita's cargo hold the holders agreed. The special auction session went for a whole month and aroused interest of an unprecedented scale in every circle of society, not only in the UC, but in the whole known galaxy as well.

After the auction Nergan became obscenely, unimaginably rich.

That's was the beginning of Jart Nergan's financial empire which would last for almost two hundred years before breaking up into a few smaller trusts and corporations. Its foundation would be the subject of many books and articles. No researcher would pass over the Hyppolita's famous trip during which she had lost one third of her crew, two engines, all her force shields and armored plating of her prow, not counting lots of other, less critical parts.

Nergan spared no money on the Hyppolita's repairs, and repaired she was, or rather rebuild from scratch. Nergan appointed his second mate as her new captain (his first mate had been killed during the legendary trip). The Hyppolita was in business for two decades more before she was finally decommissioned and sent to eternal rest at the IxionSpacecraftMuseum, no less. Nergan always had been vain.

Admittedly the museum curators might have contacted him about the ship themselves, because the Captain of the Hyppolita holovid series had already been aired in full and became a hit all over the galaxy. The series followed the wild youth of the notorious ex-smuggler, his adventures and travels, including the trip to the Easter star-cluster, while shamelessly exaggerating and embroidering them, of course.

The tradition of turning the truth into fancy fiction was started by Nergan himself and the other members of his crew who survived the trip. Every passing day this or that vivid and totally made-up detail was added to their life stories, their functions on the flight, their roles in discovering a planet with rich reserves of rare elements, the circumstances of finding a vault on it, full to the brim with amazing artifacts left thousands of years ago by an extinct humanoid race, previously unknown to science. At the end almost nothing truthful was left, and they became living legends, Nergan the greatest one of all.

In a month he became a millionaire and made his whole crew rich. He granted a life pensions to the families of his dead comrades. Also he paid an astronomical amount of money for the mining rights on the planet he had discovered (and named, quite predictably, Hyppolita).

Five years later the mining of rare elements on Hyppolita had begun. Not only did Nergan compensated his expenses with a vengeance, he made such insane profits that he was able to buy all of the Galaxia Corporation, which had previously owned his ship.

During the next decade he became something akin to a monopolist of the interplanetary freight service. In his later life he founded the biggest financial empire in the galaxy which was inherited by his only son. But all of that happened later. Presently...