Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network

by E. M. Foner

  “Choppers?” Georgia interrupted again.

  “You know, thieves who steal ships to chop them up for parts. Anyway, a trader I know who was parked nearby came running out and gave me a sheaf of paperwork. Actual paper, can you believe that? She tried to stop the repo team from taking the ship, but they told her that I’d defaulted on the mortgage and they were engaged in a lawful repossession. I didn’t even know that they had the override codes for the controller, but it turns out all of that stuff was included in the original Sharf mortgage data.”

  “So your mortgage was one of those bundled into a security—”

  “About ten months ago I got conned in a deal for fuel packs,” Daryl spoke over her. “The seller rigged them out with thin-film battery overlays in the power ports, so when I tested them, they read over eighty percent of the life left. I should have known something was wrong because the asking price was too low, but the guy had a sob story about needing cash to cover his mortgage, and I got greedy and blew all of my operating capital on them. A day after I realized I’d been had, the reps from MORE showed up and offer me a refi deal.”

  “I didn’t quite understand what happened with the fuel packs,” Georgia said. “Those thin-film batteries you talked about. Are they alien technology?”

  “Verlock, I think. I found out later that most species use them in tabs, but a fuel pack holds like a trillion times more power than a thin-film battery—it’s completely different technology. I only found out when I sold the first fuel pack to another trader and he didn’t even make it off the ground. It’s lucky for me that ship controllers test the reserve capacity when they power up or I might have been guilty of murder. As it is, the guy socked me in the jaw for being an idiot, and I deserved it.”

  “So just to recap, you spent all of your cash on fuel packs that turned out to be worthless, and then MORE reps happened to show up and offer you a lifeline.”

  “At the time I was like, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ but the payment schedule left no room for error, and when I tried the new trading platform—”

  “Advantage?” Georgia interjected.

  “Disadvantage is more like it. Within six months of the refi, I was selling at cost to try to raise cash for payments. Now I’m just another shipless bum at Rendezvous hoping somebody has room for a thirty-one-year-old apprentice so I can start over again.”

  “Did you report it to anybody? EarthCent Intelligence?”

  “About the fuel packs? I put the word out on the trader network, but I’m sure the guy was using a fake name and probably a disguise. It’s easy with Horten facial gel to pass as somebody else for a few days.”

  “I meant about the MORE reps showing up right after it happened.”

  Daryl’s face turned pale. “You believe they set me up? The timing seemed suspicious when I thought about it later, but I figured I was just being paranoid. I wouldn’t even be telling you this now if it wasn’t for the guy with the cool gryphon at the Tall Tales competition last night. He’s right about sharing information. If all of your readers laughing at me for being a sucker is what it takes to keep some other trader from losing his ship, I’ve got a thick enough skin for that.”

  “Thank you, Daryl. And I don’t think anybody will laugh at you,” Georgia said. “Oh, and take a marker,” she added, producing one from her purse.

  “As if I had something to write on, but beggars can’t be choosers,” the trader said. “Speaking of which, I’m going for another round of free pancakes.”

  “Good interview?” Larry asked her after the grounded trader got back in line.

  “A couple more like that and we’ll have this story wrapped up before Rendezvous is over,” she said. “How are you making out?”

  “Our opponents are giving away more than playing cards,” Larry replied grimly. “One woman showed me a token that’s good for twenty creds off her next mortgage payment if their side wins. Somebody has deep pockets.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “There was never really any competition for seats before, and some years, my dad and the old hands had to beg their friends to stand as candidates to round out the number. Why would the Guild need rules about buying votes when they couldn’t give away the seats on the council?”

  “I guess. What are they doing?” she asked, pointing at the ramp leading up to the hold of Fanny’s ship. People were beginning to gather around, and it looked like a middle-aged woman was preparing to give a speech.

  “I forgot about this, we should go over and listen,” Larry said. “There was an announcement at the first round of the Tall Tales contest that somebody from the president’s office was here to talk about new opportunities on Earth.”

  “The president of EarthCent is here?”

  “His public relations director, and I think I remember reading somewhere that she’s his mistress, so she probably speaks for him. I never traded on Earth because it doesn’t seem like a promising place to find alien artifacts, but if they make it profitable…”

  There was a loud whistle of feedback from the sound system that Fanny’s family had rigged to the ship and everybody who still had their high-frequency hearing winced. The woman from EarthCent was obviously an experienced presenter because she didn’t flinch or apologize, instead taking advantage of the sudden silence to launch into her speech.

  “For those of you who don’t read the scandal pages, my name is Hildy Greuen, and I’m here from the president’s office to talk about our Twenty-Second Century Bazaar initiative.”

  “Bizarre?” a kid standing at the bottom of the ramp asked.

  “Bazaar, with three A’s,” Hildy explained. “It’s just another name for a trade fair that’s permanently in the same place. There’s a good example on Flower if any of you get the chance to visit.”

  “You want us to travel all the way to Earth to lay out our blankets?”

  “How many of you are familiar with the concept of subsidies?” Hildy asked in reply.

  “You’re willing to pay us to come to Earth?” This question put an end to the breakfast conversations that hadn’t already been halted, and all heads swiveled toward the woman standing at the top of the ramp.

  “Exactly. For some years now, we’ve been advertising Earth as a tourist destination for aliens, and thanks to the fact that most visitors arrive by passenger liner and take the space elevator, we’ve had good luck getting them to fill out exit surveys during the long ride back up to orbit. Can anybody guess the most frequent answer to the question about their biggest disappointment after visiting?”

  “Air quality,” somebody shouted.

  “Lack of anatomically correct public restrooms,” a wit suggested.

  “Crime?” asked one of Fanny’s family who was standing behind Hildy.

  “All of your answers appeared with some frequency, but the number one complaint was the retail environment,” Hildy told them. “Other than the occasional street vendor, the lack of outdoor markets in popular tourist areas is what bothered the aliens most. Many of them said that they would have spent more creds on souvenirs and handicrafts if they’d had the opportunity, but retail stores on Earth are designed for human shoppers and human sensibilities.”

  “So you want us to travel to Earth to sell local products to aliens?” a trader asked incredulously.

  “The first part of the initiative is to fund visiting-trader positions for those of you who are willing to mentor locals in presenting their merchandise and doing business with aliens,” Hildy explained. “We’ll cover your expenses plus a stipend, and of course, any profits you earn trading on your own account remain yours.”

  “Talk is cheap,” somebody called out. “Where is EarthCent getting the money?”

  “They’re cleaning up on the All Species Cookbook,” another trader in the crowd informed the skeptic. “I just came from Union Station and they can’t keep up with the demand. I have two thousand hardcover copies of the Frunge edition if anybody wants to talk business.”


  “The second part of the initiative, which all of you can take part in even if you have no intention of ever visiting Earth, is telling people about it,” Hildy continued. “EarthCent ambassadors are in the process of negotiating deals with the leading travel agencies from all of the tunnel network species. As soon as those agreements are in place, you’ll be able to promote low-cost package tours with the Twenty-Second Century Bazaar branding.”

  “Why would we cut our own throats by sending business to Earth?” an older trader demanded.

  “Commission,” Hildy responded. “The details have yet to be finalized, but we’re hoping to be able to pay five percent of the total value of the tour package as a finder’s fee.”

  “Why?” the same trader asked suspiciously.

  “Because advertising is expensive. You don’t want to know what twenty-six seconds of commercial time during the broadcast of a Grenouthian documentary costs. And who’s in a better position than yourselves to recognize prospects who might be willing to travel to Earth for some shopping? Given the cost and the time commitment required, we’re talking about a tiny percentage of your customer base, so you won’t be competing with yourselves.”

  “How is it going to work, the commission thing?” another of Fanny’s offspring asked. “Do we have to show up at the travel agency with the prospect?”

  “We’ve licensed a system of unique discount codes from the Drazens,” Hildy explained. “It’s all handled through your mini-registers, the Stryx take a small percentage. After you sign up at any EarthCent embassy or consulate, your programmable cred will be added to our existing payroll system and you’ll be supplied with Drazen coupon blanks. When you have a prospect, you’ll enter a null tourism sale into your mini-register which will produce a unique code. Copy that code into the coupon blank, which offers a ten percent discount on the travel package.”

  “And the commission gets paid to my programmable cred?”

  “The travel agencies will remit the code to EarthCent for reimbursement, and the next time you slot your programmable cred into your own mini-register, you’ll be paid. If you want to pre-register so we can get an idea of the demand for the coupon blanks, I can take names now.”

  With that statement, the line for pancakes split like a river that had suddenly discovered a new channel, and half of the people already seated at picnic tables also queued up to supply their contact information for Hildy to enter into her tab.

  “Well, that’s something,” Larry commented to Georgia. “It’s probably worth signing up for, but I’ll wait until the next time I’m on a Stryx station and do it at the embassy.”

  “EarthCent must be making even more on the cookbook than I thought,” she replied. “Did I tell you my name is in the credits?”

  “Miss, uh, reporter,” a familiar voice said behind her, and she turned to find Daryl with a woman of around the same age. “This is Kobby. Tell her what you just told me,” he instructed his companion.

  “I was visiting Earth for the first time last month, and I was approached by a person liquidating a museum collection,” Kobby began. “I don’t deal in shady goods, I know too many traders who have lost their shirts that way, but this woman had been a curator and she had all of the documentation.”

  “Do you mind if I record this?” Georgia asked, pulling her reporter’s tab from her belt pouch.

  “Yes, I mean, no, I don’t mind. I want you to publish this. The museum was in a small city, and the curator explained that they had consolidated their collection with another museum in a better location, and she was tasked with selling the leftovers to raise operating cash. I keep most of my money in merchandise, but the deal was so good that I went to the closest MORE branch office. Their reps had introduced themselves to me on Echo Station just a few months earlier, and even though I wasn’t interested in a cash-out refi or Advantage, I kept their contact info.”

  “So you did a mortgage refi and couldn’t keep up with the payments?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Daryl put in. “Tell her, Kobby.”

  “I bought two full sets of armor and spent the rest on swords and other old weapons since I know that the aliens will buy any of that stuff at a premium. I received all of the paperwork showing provenance and everything, but when I arrived here at Aarden, I saw that Flower was in orbit. There’s a Frunge blacksmith working at Colonial Jeevesburg on Flower who I’ve traded with before, so I decided to bring him a few weapons for evaluation.”

  “Everything was fake,” Daryl interjected.

  “The blacksmith was very nice about it,” Kobby choked out, brushing away a tear with the back of her hand. “He said the replicas were actually very good and offered to take them on consignment to sell to the human gaming fanatics who can’t afford real antiques, but they’re worth at best a quarter of what I spent on them. I don’t know how I’m going to keep up with the new loan payments.”

  “You’ll take me as an apprentice and we’ll work on it together,” Daryl said.

  “Have you reported the fraud to anybody yet?” Georgia asked.

  “I showed the paperwork to an expatriate Earth lawyer Flower recommended who lives in the independent living cooperative. Brenda only needed a few minutes to find the small print where everything was identified as museum-quality replicas, including in the provenance documentation. I guess it’s something they used to do in small museums on Earth that couldn’t afford the real thing. The curator sold them as authentic medieval pieces, but I didn’t record my meetings with her, so I don’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “When I file my story, I’ll ask the editor to hand-carry it to EarthCent Intelligence since their offices are next door,” Georgia said. “I’d like to capture images of the paperwork you received if that’s all right with you. Did you have anything else to add?”

  “Tell her about the finance manager,” Daryl urged.

  “That could just be my imagination,” Kobby protested. “You know what it’s like when you start playing back a conversation in your head.”

  “But it brings the whole story together.”

  The woman sighed, and then looked Georgia straight in the eye. “The way I remember it, the finance manager at MORE didn’t care what I wanted the money for, she cut me off before I could even explain. She said that my account was in good standing and they’d do a cash-out refi and give me the money to gamble in a casino if that’s what I wanted. But when it was all done and I told her I was off to make the biggest purchase of my life, she said, ‘Stop worrying. Armor is always a good investment.’ It didn’t hit me until I got to Aarden and found out I’d been cheated that I never told her I was buying armor.”

  Eighteen

  “I think we’re in trouble, Dad,” Larry said. “Everywhere I went last night there were people with playing cards in their hatbands buying drinks for the crowd.”

  “It’s my fault, the council’s fault, for not seeing this coming,” Phil told his son. “We should have realized that as soon as a seat on the council meant more than a lot of drudge work planning the next Rendezvous, candidates with vested interests would get involved. The ironic thing is it will be up to the new council to make any rule changes, and somehow I doubt they’ll be shooting the horse they rode in on.”

  “The two of you sound like a couple of boys whose kite string broke,” Rachel scolded them. “Are you just going to give up? You tell them, Georgia.”

  The freelancer looked up from her tab and then thrust the device at Larry. “Read this,” she instructed him, and then proceeded to make it unnecessary by filling everybody in on the contents of the Galactic Free Press article. “The paper ran Ellen’s story on the front page. They even hired a Verlock mathematician to provide a forensic statistical analysis of all the Advantage recommendations she documented. He proved beyond a doubt that the platform was designed to create losses.”

  “You’re talking about the new system so many young traders are using?” Phil asked.

  “They called it ‘Advant
age’ because it was supposed to give users an advantage over the competition by providing real-time data about market demand. There’s a note from the managing editor that while he would have preferred to delay publication until they could identify the responsible parties behind the fraud, the Galactic Free Press believes it to be in the public interest to inform the community now before more traders go broke.”

  “The reps from the finance outfit that bought my mortgage from the Sharf tried to push some new platform on me right before Joe introduced you back on Union Station,” Larry told Georgia. “I didn’t hear them out because I wasn’t interested.”

  “Was it MORE?” Georgia asked. “Ellen told me that most of the traders she interviewed first heard about Advantage through MORE financial services, and the name kept coming up with the traders I talked to yesterday.”

  “Yeah, that’s them. I wonder why it’s not in the article?”

  “Because it would be tantamount to accusing the main servicer of ship mortgages held by humans of trying to drive their borrowers into bankruptcy. We need proof.”

  “It’s possible that the finance company is as much a victim as the traders in this case,” Rachel pointed out. “It’s doubtful they would know anything about galactic trading conditions, so they’re probably just paying the real owners of this Advantage platform to be able to offer clients a benefit.”

  “It’s possible, but it doesn’t feel that way to me,” Georgia said. “Reporters have a nose for this sort of thing.”

  “Like you knew Colony One was a scam?” Larry teased her.

  “That was different, and Ellen told me that investigative journalists always strike out on their first story. Anyway, read the sidebar by Bob Steelforth, Union Station’s chief correspondent. He did an interview with Clive Oxford, the director of EarthCent Intelligence, who said they’ve launched an investigation into Advantage with the cooperation of Earth authorities and ISPOA, the Inter Species Police Operation Agency.”