by Randy Dyess
Grand bosses were also allowed to increase their individual territories through direct conquest of a system owned by another grand boss. In order to do this, the invading grand boss had to provide evidence that they could increase the revenue stream of the system and make that system more profitable than the current grand boss. If they did not increase revenue within five pulses, they had to give up their claim and compensate the previous grand boss. They would often disagree on what, exactly, an increase in revenue and profits entailed, or what the compensation should be, and these disagreements would be settled through a small war, until the grand council became involved. Wars were common and Syndicate territories were constantly changing hands.
Running thousands of planets efficiently was impossible, so the family territories were divided into smaller sub-territories run by under bosses who reported to the grand boss of each family. They would, however, essentially have complete control over their sub-territories and could run them as they saw fit, as long as taxes were paid on time and revenue was increased by at least ten percent each year. If the under boss was not paying their taxes or failed to increase their revenue each year, they were executed by the grand boss. Under bosses who wasted or misused the resources of their territories also faced execution.
Slataxi, the current Nlipirax family’s grand boss, controlled forty sub-territories and three-thousand planets. He, however, wanted more. The industries on the planets he controlled were the source of his revenue and wealth. His under bosses, including Klachur, were responsible for organizing the three-thousand planets for maximum revenue by increasing the technology and industries of the intelligent beings on the planets. The output of these industries was heavily taxed by Slataxi, and the resources of any planet that was not industrialized were mined in his name and sold on the open market.
Klachur had control of nine of Slataxi’s sub-territories and two-hundred planets. He had not been growing the industries and technology of the planets in his sub-territories and currently only used them to provide raw protein food sources. He enjoyed spending time traveling, rather than running planets or the industries on them. Once he’d taken control of his nine sub-territories, he’d harvested all of the intelligent species to the point that they couldn’t sustain a viable civilization, and then he’d replaced them with the Syndicate’s favorite delicacy: Gyrdyds. They were thirty-meter tall reptiles, and their meat was prized by all Syndicate gourmets. He had captured the Gyrdyds market, but had razed his planets to do so.
*****
Klachur was still fuming as he sat in his chair and thought about how he could quickly increase his revenue to meet Slataxi’s unreasonable demands. He had already harvested the Gyrdyds in all of his sub-territories to pay his annual taxes. Because he hadn’t been growing the industries and technologies like he should have been, he didn’t have any other opportunities for coming up with the additional taxes for Slataxi.
I shouldn’t have to raze my territories and ruin my revenue projections just because Slataxi needs more taxes for his stupid war with the Tubvub family, Klachur thought as he instructed his AI to open a comm channel to his enforcer, Woryant.
“Get in here,” Klachur commanded. “We need to talk.”
Woryant hated when Klachur ordered him to make the trip to his office. The communication channels in their station were secured, so there was no reason he had to travel all the way from his lab each time Klachur wanted to give him some simple task. “Yes, Boss,” Woryant replied as he stood to make his way to Klachur’s office.
Five sub-rotations later, Woryant walked into Klachur’s office, and the under boss immediately started taking his frustrations out on his enforcer. “Show me your revenue projects,” Klachur demanded. “I need to find out where you have wasted my resources and revenue.”
Woryant knew his projects plans were not inefficient; it was Klachur’s laziness that wasted the possibility of large revenue from his sub-territories. Klachur made Woryant stand there for thirty sub-rotations while he looked over his projections.
“Huh,” Klachur said. “Even though I can find errors everywhere, it looks like you have implemented my plans to the best of your feeble abilities.” Woryant remained silent, for he knew Klachur wasn’t praising him. “I, however, need you to go back through these projections and find another twenty percent for the additional taxes Slataxi is demanding. Find one of my sub-territories that we can harvest. Have you sent out your scouts, lately?”
“Yes, Boss,” Woryant replied, “but it will be a complete pulse before they are due to report back from all of the sub-territories.”
“Are the latest harvests in your projections?”
“Yes, Boss. We recently harvested all the stocks in the Quark sub-territory. The intelligent species in that sub-territory fought back and we lost a few ships.”
“What! How dare they? Did you raze the sub-territory?”
“Yes, Boss. We destroyed their few ships and razed the colony the ships were protecting. They shouldn’t be a problem in the future.”
“What about the food stocks. Were they still there?”
“Yes, Boss. The projections show their strength. If you would read—”
“I don’t want to read it—that’s why you are around. If I must do your job, then why do I need you?”
Woryant knew he had pushed Klachur as far as he could. There was no way he was going to tell him that the harvest fleet almost had to turn back when the mothership was damaged.
“What else are you not telling me? I feel you are hiding something.”
“No, Boss, I’m not hiding anything—it’s all there. The Quark sub-territory has been completely harvested, and the Emea is next in a few pulses. The rest have already been stripped and we need to regrow the stocks there.”
“We can’t wait that long. Program the AI to start harvesting the Emea sub-territory. The revenue from its harvest should be enough to satisfy Slataxi.”
“It hasn’t been enough pulses to harvest that sub-territory, yet,” Woryant warned. “It’s not ready. Those planets are not at their prime for harvesting.”
“I don’t care!” shouted Klachur. “I need the extra revenue to afford Slataxi’s stupid taxes, so go out and get it for me! I don’t care how early you must harvest a sub-territory—and I want all the intelligent species in my sub-territories harvested. Send out additional fleets and get the ones you missed. They bring high profits from the gourmet markets.”
Woryant shook his head at the stupidity of Klachur as he walked back to his lab. The under boss was not a very good at his job and he wasted the resources of his planets. Like many of the other leaders in the Syndicate, he’d achieved his position through aggression and deceit—not by his ability to run sub-territories. He often ignored long-term profit planning in order to obtain quick wealth; the food sources on the Emea planet needed another four hundred pulses before reaching optimal harvest capacity, and Klachur had already harvested the other eight sub-territories he controlled. He just hoped there would be enough harvested material to make the revenue Klachur demanded.
Woryant knew that the under boss had a hidden slush fund and could pay the additional taxes, if needed, but he wanted to save that hidden source of credits to fuel his expansion plans when Slataxi was defeated by the Tubvub family. The grand boss’s main territories were rich beyond imagination, and Klachur wanted a piece of them. It was up to Woryant to figure out how this was going to be done.
*****
Woryant entered his lab, muttering to himself, “The damn idiot is going to get us executed. Why did he harvest all of the intelligent species in our territories? If he had an ounce of brains, he would have used them to grow the industries. I know there are small pockets of them left. Maybe I can capture them and start over again.” Hopefully there would be enough of them left to rebuild.
He sat at his desk and had his AI display the eight intelligent species that used to populate the planets under Klachur’s control. They’d been joined togethe
r in a trading confederation and had very advanced technology when the Syndicate had obtained control over their planets through the treaty with the Feebies. Granted, there had not been very many individuals of the species, but if Klachur had let them develop, he would now be in control of the most advanced technology available to the Syndicate. He would have easily replaced Slataxi, by now, and probably would have been powerful enough to be on the grand council. Even outnumbered a million to one, the species had almost defeated the harvesting fleets with their technology.
“He’s acting like a small-time farmer and not the genius under boss he thinks he is. He is the only one who uses intelligent species for food, or eradicates them to make way for his other food species,” Woryant said to no one. He knew he was safe in his lab, as he had the room swept for listening devices every hour. The Syndicate may have been one organization, but no one was stupid enough to trust anyone else within it.
He instructed his AI to close down the reports. Oh well, he thought as they vanished, all I have to do is keep preparing for the day he’s found out for the idiot he is. He needed to make sure he wouldn’t be part of Klachur’s downfall, though; his plans for increasing the revenue in all sub-territories had to be updated and ready for when the grand boss would execute him for failing to sustain revenue in his territory.
Woryant sat still for a few minutes, thinking about how he could make sure he would be safe when his under boss was executed. Maybe I need to move the process along to get the idiot removed. He thought about his familial unit’s sibling in the Dachir family. What if I worked out a deal to hand Klachur’s head to them? I bet I could convince them to let me take control, once that idiot is gone.
He instructed his AI to start working on a new revenue projection for Klachur’s territories. He knew his revenue plan would get the territories back on track in a few rotations; if he could convince the Dachir family’s grand boss, she would let him take control—especially if he raided Klachur’s hidden slush fund and made a few bribes.
“Computer,” Woryant commanded his AI, “send scouts to all sub-territories. I want them to focus on finding the remainder of the intelligent species.” When Klachur had harvested the sub-territories, he hadn’t bothered with completely eradicating the intelligent species; there were still pockets of them living on small moons and space stations. Woryant had instructed his harvesting fleets to ignore them whenever he harvested the sub-territories, because he always knew they might come in handy for some future need. Their technology had been impressive thousands of pulses ago, when Slataxi had taken control, and it should have been even more impressive after all these years. Woryant wondered just how far their technology had advanced, and if he could actually control them.
“Computer,” Woryant commanded again, “instruct the scouts to complete technology scans of our sub-territories. I want a complete picture of the technology levels of all intelligent species in our sub-territories. Ignore the food sources; focus on the technology, population locations, and counts of level three or greater intelligent species.”
“As you command,” the AI responded. “Level three technology scans will be performed. Do you want standard reports?”
“No—do not send the reports to anyone but me. I want you to include the scans in your new revenue projections and determine how much any technology found would be worth on the open market. Also, complete level four scans on any military technology.”
“As you command.”
Might as well arm a few ships, while I’m at it, Woryant thought. You never know when you might need some advanced weapons to save yourself. “Computer, wake up harvesting fleets A3, A7, A10, and B1. I want them prepped and ready to harvest the Emea sub-territory in three rotations.”
“As you command. All Freack will be activated in harvesting fleets A3, A7, A10, and B1.”
“Very good. Let me know when they have completed their preps and are ready to be deployed, and send additional scouts to the Emea sub-territory to work on the harvesting plan. I want a report completed in two rotations.”
“As you command,” the AI responded.
Woryant pulled up a view of the Freack nests, and he watched as millions of Freack scurried out of their stasis tubes and began boarding the harvesting ships. They would be prepped and loaded in a few sub-rotations, but he wanted to stall the harvest until his scouts reported back and he had a chance to prepare an efficient harvesting plan.
Chapter 5
Dan Petre sighed as he walked down yet another dusty corridor. There was dust on the walls, dust on the floor, and dust floating in the air. Over the years, the mines of the mining asteroid he worked on, PMC-234579, were playing out, and Peterson Mining had been closing off abandoned tunnels and unneeded corridors of the main mining complex.
Peterson Mining had determined it would be more cost-effective to keep oxygen flowing in the abandoned tunnels and unused mining complex corridors, like the one Dan was making his way down, instead of trying to seal them off from the active areas. That didn’t mean, however, that they had to provide gravity or run air filters. No gravity and no air flow meant dust just floated in the air. Only when they fired the gravity disruptors to keep the asteroid from slamming into a bigger asteroid did the dust ever move—well, that and whenever Dan walked down these corridors to that special hatch good ol’ Ted had told him about.
My whole life has been spent in dust, Dan thought as he pushed in the code Ted had given him over ten years ago. It unlocked outer hatches without setting off any alarm and made life on this tiny mining asteroid just a little more bearable for a man like Dan, who’d grown up in the middle of nowhere on a mostly-deserted planet, looking at the night sky every evening.
Every time a new manager came to the station, Dan worried they would find his special code and disable it. He didn’t know how he would cope and what he would do if he couldn’t use it to open the outer hatches to get his daily fix of the stars. He stepped through the first set of hatches into the airlock, which was only big enough for one person at a time. It quickly cycled and Dan stepped through the second hatch.
“I grew up on a dusty, corporate rock planet, and my big escape landed me on a much smaller dusty rock in space,” he said aloud as he started climbing the stairs to the upper hatch.
Dan was a space-rock miner. Becoming an independent contract miner had been his way off the farm, which generations of his family had worked on—not owned, but worked on. The farm was located on the planet Petrus, which was owned by the Candus Corporation. Land on corporate-owned planets was owned by the corporation, and farm workers were paid based on their harvest. It was never enough money to allow the farmer or their children to ever leave the planet, though, so generation after generation would be stuck on the same farm and in the same home, scraping by between each harvest. That was, unless you turned sixteen, which was considered the age of consent on corporation planets, and found some way off. Becoming a contract miner was one of the ways a young, strong boy like Dan could escape the cycles of serfdom
All his life, he had heard about contract miners who’d made it big during their contracts. Contract miners were considered “independents,” which meant he had to pay for everything, including the cost of the trip to the mining asteroid. He was also paid by commission, though, rather than a wage, and putting in long hours and working hard during a ten-year mining contract almost always left the miner with something unheard of for someone who grew up on a corporate planet: money in the bank. This money could be used to buy a small business or a mining ship—a ship you could take into the asteroid fields in non-corporate-owned space. It was a ship you could fill with valuable minerals—a ship that would help you find a few hundred pounds of U-981, which would be worth more than a wage slave on a corporate planet would make in a lifetime. It was a ship that would change the future of the miner and their descendants.
U-981 fueled the FTL drives and was extremely rare and getting rarer in known space, and only the bravest or most reckless m
iners would leave known space to hunt for it. If they didn’t die—and most did, because no one could come to your rescue if something went wrong—they could become extremely rich after discovering a nice deposit of U-981. They’d be wealthy enough to buy a larger ship to mine even more, and maybe they could start their own mining company or shipping lines. It might take five or ten generations, but it was a well-known fact that miners who found a large deposit of U-981 changed the course of their family’s future and ended up owning whole planets, or large, sanctioned sections of asteroid fields with mining fleets, moon bases, and mining complexes, like the one Dan currently worked on.
