Pay Me, Bug!

Chapter 14

WHEREIN Our Hero discovers the Perils of Driving Too Fast

Grif shifted in his seat, glancing at the tactical display nervously. It was blank. It shouldn't be blank, he thought.

"Anything on the sensors, Morgan?" Grif tried to keep the concern out of his voice.

"Big rocks, floating through space," Morgan answered gruffly.

Grif grinned. Since he'd been commandeered by Velis, Morgan had been in a foul mood. He has no one to blame but himself, Grif decided. That's what happens when you notice a detail that all of the resources of a major galactic spy organization have managed to overlook.

"Stupid spies," Morgan muttered.

Bennet, manning the communications station on the other side of the bridge, ignored him.

"Right," Grif said. "Well... please let me know if any of those rocks float in our direction. Ever been to Tyrelos, Bennet?"

"No," Bennet said. "Haven't done much in Trade Baron space. What's it like?"

"Nice place," Grif said. "Lots of interesting people... Morgan, pay attention."

A piece of rock about half the size of the Fool's Errand could be seen off the starboard side. It wasn't in danger of crossing the ship's path, but it also hadn't shown up on the tactical screens.

"What? Damn. Sorry." Morgan bent over the sensor station, frowning.

Grif sighed. This wasn't the time for him to be missing important data. Tyrelos Station was located in the middle of what once had been a moon of Obin, the system's gas giant. It had been torn apart by Obin's gravity relatively recently—"relatively" in terms of astronomical events, not human history—and the debris was in the process of forming a ring. The proto-ring was classified as "heavily concentrated," which meant that if you could see it through a view port it was probably too late to alter course to avoid it. It was a difficult area to navigate.

On the other hand, it was an excellent area to set up a mining operation, and ore extraction was one of Tylaris Industries' strong suits.

"Keep your eyes on the rocks, Morgan, that's all I'm asking right now," Grif said.

Morgan nodded. "Sorry Grif. I haven't quite figured out how to filter out all the extraneous information. It's a little crowded on my screen..."

They continued on in silence for a few minutes.

"The one thing I do know about Tyrelos," Bennet said, "though only because I just looked it up... there are no habitable planets in this system."

"Yeah," Grif said.

"Isn't that unusual, in this day and age?" Bennet asked.

"A little," Grif said. "Most people prefer to settle in systems that are easy. But Tyrelos Industries, they don't do easy. They specialize in hostile and exotic environments, ore extraction, mineral processing, and ridiculous feats of engineering. Wait till you see the capital..."

"You'd think a Trade Baron would find a more profitable system to claim as their own," Bennet said.

"I think House Tyrelos considers it a long-term project," Grif said. "Apparently there are minerals and gasses they extract from Obin that go into their more exotic alloys that they can't find anywhere else. At least, not easily... but you're right. This system is a bit of a money pit."

If Baron Tylaris was the richest and most powerful of the Trade Barons, Baron Tyrelos was the poorest. Tylaris owned four planetary systems, all with multiple life-bearing planets rich in natural resources; Tyrelos claimed one system only, with merely two colonized planets, neither of which could sustain life. While the Tyrelos system was rich in resources—perhaps, some speculated, one of the richest areas in known space, particularly for rare alloys and minerals—those resources were found in very inhospitable places: asteroid belts, planets with corrosive atmospheres, planets too close to the sun to sustain any permanent settlement, and frozen comets with temperatures nearing absolute zero.