Part 2: Beyond Eden
I surveyed the wreckage of my old ship,
The Nuncupatory Wedge
, with mixed feelings.
She had been my constant companion for a good fifteen terran years before I had lost her, just three years ago. I had been smuggling some extremely special cargo out
Beyond
when something had happened to her. I had only the haziest memories of an explosion before I lost consciousness. Luckily for me, with her dying actions,
The Wedge
had somehow managed to jettison her escape shuttle with me in it along with the coordinates of the wreckage site so that I could make my way back if I were able.
The shuttle had identified an unmanned base on a planet, less than a light-hour hubwards and had set off towards it while keeping me in a sub-coma.
My good fortune had continued when the base turned out to be inhabited by three castaways, all sexually-desperate gorgeous young Mod women.
I sighed, remembering the fifteen idyllic months I'd been with them before we were rescued, typically spending each perfect day in a haze of sexual bliss whilst the three girls and I casually and lasciviously experimented with each other's bodies.
But now as I looked at the debris of my former ship, my savage satisfaction at finally finding her was coloured by a deep melancholy at her loss.
It didn't take long to find the cargo bay. It had broken into three pieces but the consignment was still there, a packaged cube no bigger than two metres a side. It was spinning crazily as the fragments of the superstructure lazily floated around it.
It took a few hours to slow its rotation and bring it aboard my newly reconditioned freighter,
The Effulgent Libertine
, an old ship I had restored using various parts from various old wrecks, calling in every favour I had accumulated throughout my grubby lifetime.
As the package gradually acclimatised in
The Libertine's
cargo bay, I watched it on a screen. To think that this tiny package was the key to my future – the difference between untold riches on one hand and a lifetime of minor long haul jobs of dubious legality and struggling to make ends meet on the other.
The package contained one of the rarest and most sought-after pieces of technology available in the galaxy: a Morris-Hitachi 'Terraform-Buster' Planetary Grade VI Seeding Bomb. Banned across the civilised galaxy apart from after an interminably long process of approval by each member of the entire Pan-Galactic Assembly, the Seeding Bomb could turn a standard terran sized lump of rock into a fully-functioning life-friendly nitrogen-oxygen balanced planet in just a few years.
They were used extensively a couple of hundred terran years ago when the human race expanded chaotically throughout the galaxy but once this over-expansion ground to a halt with a resultant cross-galactic economic crash, the various planetary governments decided that, for reasons of security and politics, maybe it wasn't safe to just allow anyone access to these amazing pieces of kit.
In any case, in practice it was an exceptionally rare occurrence for an accepted government to be allowed to use one. And it was unheard of for any to fall into the hands of private individuals.
Which was why when I had found one, I knew my life had changed.
I had been making a run across the back end of the Sirian Concourse almost four years ago when
The Wedge
had detected potential salvage in a minor asteroid belt. I'd debated even bothering to look; after all 95% of such opportunities turned out to be a waste of time. But I'd taken a chance and had been rewarded handsomely with the remnants of a Rigellan Navy Dreadnought, probably holed after shield failure.
In any case, the wreck had been maybe 180 years old and had yielded the kind of flotsam of which an old pirate like me could only dream in the form of a pristine Seeding Bomb, complete with initiation keys.
Of course, I had known I had to be careful. Wars had been fought over Seeding Bombs and, if I wanted to yield any value, I'd known I'd have to take it
Beyond
.
Beyond
represented those worlds outside the aegis of the Pan-Galactic Assembly, the galaxy's de facto governing organisation. When you went
Beyond
you took a chance, leaving behind the accepted laws and received morals of humanity.
Beyond
was where you could buy anything for a price on one of many single-interest crackpot planets run by governments ranging from personal dictatorships to eccentric qualified democracies and everything in between.
In any case I'd known that the Bomb would be confiscated as soon as I revealed its existence unless I took it
Beyond
to someone who would be willing to pay its real value.
And that's what I'd been doing when something had destroyed my ship, almost destroying me and leaving me stranded for months with my, admittedly, gorgeous companions.
I brought my mind back to the present to focus on the task in hand which was to find
The Wedge's
data recorder to see if there were any clues to what had actually happened to destroy her.
It took longer to find but I eventually located it and downloaded it into